Study Guide on Chekhov s The Seagull Researched and written

Study Guide on Chekhov’s The Seagull Researched and written for Theatre de la Jeune Lune by Cynthia C. Ramsey February 2003 Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 2 The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language. –Chekhov, in a letter to his publisher and mentor, Alexey Suvorin (1888) Table of Contents A Brief Biography 3 Historical Background: Russia in the 1880s-‘90s 5 Chekhovian Themes 6 Chekhov and the Theater 8 The Seagull’s History 11 Sources for The Seagull 15 Notes on The Seagull 19 A Guide to Russian Names 24 Pronunciation Guide 26 Bibliography 28 Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 3 Autobiography? I have a disease—“autobiographophobia.” To read any sort of details about myself or, worse, to write them for publication, is true torture for me. –Chekhov in a letter to Grigory Rossolimo, a medical school classmate (1899) A Brief Biography January 17, 1860: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is born into a large family in Taganrog, a small town on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia. As opposed to most 19th -century Russian writers, who came either from the aristocracy or from the rising civil servant class, Chekhov’s beginnings are peasant and provincial: his paternal grandfather was a serf who, through sheer hard labor, saved 3500 rubles to purchase himself and his family out of serfdom in 1841, twenty years before the official emancipation of the serfs in Russia. 1860s: Chekhov’s father led a strict household, with the children’s time divided among school, working in his grocery store, strict daily observance of Russian Orthodox Church worship, and generous helpings of corporal discipline. However, the siblings were close: Chekhov’s older brother Alexander’s memoirs recount the family’s enactment of several merry family theatricals, mostly authored and performed by Anton. Chekhov’s mother was a wonderful storyteller. 1868-1879: Chekhov attends school at the local gymnazija, a sort of government junior high and high school. In 1876, the family grocery business fails, and Chekhov’s bankrupt father flees with the family to Moscow, leaving Chekhov alone in Taganrog to finish school. He supports himself for three years by tutoring, and develops his interest in theater by sneaking into local productions. 1879: Chekhov joins his family in Moscow and enrolls in the medical school at Moscow State University, on partial scholarship. While in school, Chekhov also provides the main source of income to his family by writing sketches for humor journals, producing 200-300 per year in the early 1880s. The beginning of Chekhov’s professional writing career coincides with the end of the Golden Age of Russian Realism and the beginning of a largely dry spell in Russian literature. Chekhov is the only generally acknowledged genius and widely read author from this period. 1884: Chekhov graduates from medical school. Though he would practice medicine intermittently for the rest of his life, it never provided him any income, since he largely treated peasants and poor workers at provincial clinics free of charge. In the same year, Chekhov suffers his first hemorrhage from tuberculosis. He would hide the disease’s existence from others for several years, though he himself was well aware that from the age of 24 he was living under a death sentence. 1886: The powerful publishing magnate Alexey Suvorin takes on Chekhov as one of his writers. Also in 1886, then-famous writer Dmitry Grigorovich “discovers” Chekhov, Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 4 and sends him a letter encouraging him to take his work more seriously. Chekhov takes the advice with great honor. 1887: Chekhov is awarded the prestigious Pushkin Prize for his prose. late 1880s-early 1890s: Chekhov makes the transition to become a real, critically recognized, full-blown, mature artist. His greatest prose pieces are written after 1888, and he begins to really see himself more as an artist and less of an entertainer. By the 1890s, Chekhov’s popularity has become widespread, and he devotes less time and energy to prose and more to drama. October 1896: Disastrous first staging of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Despite future successes in the theater, this fiasco will haunt Chekhov’s future playwrighting efforts for the rest of his life. 1897: Chekhov experiences severe hemorrhaging, causing him to acknowledge the seriousness of his tuberculosis. In 1899 he abandons his beloved estate Melikhovo for the warmer climate of Yalta, on the Crimean Sea. Chekhov never recovers from what he considered exile from the Moscow literary and theatrical worlds. Written 1895-1896, Uncle Vanya is first staged in the Russian provinces. December 1898: The Seagull receives its second hugely successful premiere at the Moscow Art Theater (MAT), which becomes known as “Chekhov’s theater.” October 1899: Uncle Vanya opens at MAT to great success. In 1900, in celebration of the centennial, the company performs the play in Yalta for Chekhov, unable to travel. Chekhov falls in love with Olga Knipper, who plays Elena. 1901: In January, The Three Sisters (written 1899-1900, inspired by Knipper) premieres to mixed reviews (but universal praise for Knipper’s portrayal of Masha) at MAT. In May, Chekhov and Olga Knipper are married. He stays in Yalta, while she continues to work as an actress in Moscow, visiting frequently. Chekhov’s tuberculosis continues to worsen, slowing his work and productivity. 1904: In January, The Cherry Orchard (written 1903) premieres on Chekhov’s birthday at MAT—again, to mixed reviews. Knipper will play the role of Varya to great acclaim for the rest of her life. In April, in response to his declining health, Chekhov’s doctors send him abroad to a spa in Badenweiler, Germany, for treatment. Attended by Knipper, Chekhov dies on the night of July 2. His body is shipped back to Russia in a train car marked “oysters”; he is buried in the cemetery of the Novo-Devichy Monastery in Moscow. However, this is all nonsense. Write whatever you like. If you have no facts, substitute something lyrical. –Chekhov, in a letter to V.A. Tikhonov, editor of the journal The North (1892) Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 5 Historical Background: Russia in the 1880s-‘90s The 18th century saw the beginnings of the Westernization of Russia, begun by Peter the Great (1682-1725) and furthered by Catherine the Great (1762-1796), during which time Russia expended a great deal of energy trying to “catch up” with Western Europe. By 1800, Russia was a huge empire with a formidable army and navy, a capital city to rival London and Paris, and the beginnings of a distinctly Russian literary tradition. The middle of the 19th century saw Russia, like much of Europe, standing at the crossroads between reform and reaction. Alexander II, the “Tsar-Liberator,” ascended to the throne in 1855, on the heels of Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War. He instituted sweeping liberal reforms, most notably the emancipation of the serfs on March 3, 1861. However, they proved to be too little, too late: the conservatives were outraged, and the liberal intelligentsia, formed in the political movements of the 1840s, had already given birth to the radicalized nihilist materialists of the 1860s, a generation gap expertly captured by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons. The government faced peasant riots in the countryside, a simmering nationalism in Poland (still a part of the Russian Empire), and a hostile press. Nihilism spawned terrorism; Alexander II, never willing to move much further beyond his earlier reforms, was assassinated in 1881. Alexander II’s assassination led to a harsh reactionary crackdown under Alexander III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917). Alexander III’s “temporary” emergency regulations (which lasted until the Revolution of 1905) enacted a state of martial law on Russian society: the relatively free press was abolished, as was the right to assembly for university students. During the 1880s and 1890s, when Chekhov reached maturity as a writer and turned his attention to playwrighting, the state sponsored forced Russification of non-Russian nationalities in the Empire and religious persecution for non-Orthodox Christians, and encouraged pogroms against the Jews restricted to the Pale of Jewish Settlement in Western Russia. Nicholas II, a good man but a visionless leader dedicated primarily to his family and the maintenance of the status quo, would continue these repressive measures until forced to change by the social unrest of 1905-1917. Chekhov is often described as the chronicler of the “twilight of the Russian nobility,” perhaps most poignantly represented by the sound of the axe at the end of The Cherry Orchard. Even before 1861, a host of diverse factors, including the structure the Russian civil service and backward agricultural methods, had combined to produce the poorest landowning class of Europe. By education and outlook, the Russian gentry was severely lacking in the skills necessary to manage large estates; many of them lived in Western Europe, going greatly into debt and leaving their estates to mismanagement and decay, often eventually mortgaging them to the state for millions of rubles. The gentry’s economic decline continued rapidly after 1861; unable to compete with the freed peasant labor and more impoverished then ever, by the end of the century many estates were eventually sold to the new small but rising middle class. (Adapted from Nicholas Riasanovsky’s A History of Russia.) Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 6 Chekhov lived only forty-four years, and during the last third of his life he was surely conscious of the likelihood of a premature death. Those of us who do not live under such a distinctly stated sentence of death cannot know what it is like. Chekhov’s masterpieces are always obliquely telling us. –Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey Chekhovian Themes Here are several more general points and themes which surface again and again in Chekhov’s plays and later stories to keep in mind. Conservation: Chekho v was one of the first writers to create an ethical code involving environmental concerns. Doctor Astrov in Uncle Vanya is widely believed to be voicing Chekhov’s belief in the innate smallness and fragility of the earth, and many stories and plays feature the destruction of a forest or grove—most notably The Cherry Orchard. However, his moral code of conservation extends beyond trees to people, encompassing his view of human suffering as perhaps the greatest waste of resources. Irony: Chekhov’s use of irony marks him as properly belonging in the 20th century alongside Samuel Beckett, rather than in the 19th with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. His characters’ statements get them nowhere, and they often can’t even finish what they’re trying to say. As Chekhov scholar Donald Rayfield writes, the plays “are full of extraneous noises, physical tics, and silences which give an ironic impotence to the sanest of rationalisations.” Masha’s taking of snuff and Medvedenko’s automatic reduction of everything to its econo mic variables are examples of this in The Seagull. Deference to the Strong: Readers often want to view Chekhov as a champion of the Little Man, but, in fact, he greatly respected brute strength. This can be seen in his close relationship with his publisher and friend Suvorin, the William Randolph Hearst of tsarist Russia; his mid-1880s enthusiasm for Darwinism; and his admiration for the lone, ruthless explorer of the Far East, Przhevalsky. Claustrophobia: Almost all of Chekhov’s characters live in closed boxes of one sort or another, both literal and figurative. They meet and clash because they cannot get away from one another, not because they are happy to discuss their various philosophies. This unceasing claustrophobic atmosphere and how they characters accomplish (or don’t) their escape provides the bulk of the dramatic tension. Abstract vs. Concrete: Like Tolstoy, Chekhov had an inborn distrust of abstractions, and of abstract words such as “kindness,” “bravery,” and “purity.” Unlike Tolstoy, he resisted creating his own philosophies and abstractions to replace the ones he debunked, insisting upon seeing people as individuals. He was stridently apolitical—something else that set him apart from most of his 19th -century compatriots. Note his common caricature of the pseudo- intellectuals in his work—especially Serebryakov in Uncle Vanya, and, on a smaller scale, Medvedenko in The Seagull. Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 7 The Woman Question: Chekhov’s attitude toward women has been much debated. The traditional view is that his women characters engender less of his empathy than men, and that they are presented much more schematically. The women fall into one of two categories: strong, self-deluding, often repellent (Arkadina in Seagull, Natasha in Three Sisters) or admirable, passive, and often eventually ruined (Nina in Seagull, the three sisters). But writer Janet Malcolm has recently pointed out that often in Chekhov’s works “women represent the freedom and ease of art, while men stand for the constraint and anxiety of commerce,” and Professor Milton Ehle argues that the women in Chekhov’s works are always “closer to the pulse of life” than the men. Erotic Love: By the 1890s, Chekhov had shaken off the yoke of Tolstoy’s Puritanism and misogyny, in which woman is a hindrance to man’s salvation (see especially The Kreutzer Sonata), and had instead embraced erotic love as the most direct path to true human involvement. His greatest story, “The Lady with the Lapdog” (1899), demonstrates how its hero leaves petty self- involvement and finds a braver selffulfillment through illicit affair with a married woman. In Chekhov’s work, sexual love can help his characters escape from their self-containing boxes; however, affairs conducted for selfish reasons (such as the Arkadina- Trigorin relationship or the TrigorinNina affair) cannot achieve that goal. Beauty: A longtime literary joke is that Chekhov the genius, no matter where he was— Moscow, Nice, Rome, Yalta—always noticed and commented upon women’s looks and clothing. This is not mere coincidence: Chekhov’s Holy Grail, in a sense, was the aesthetic experience of having been deeply moved by extraordinary, useless beauty. This is why Chekhov does not ultimately condemn Astrov for his rejection of the good but plain Sonia in favor of the beautiful and lazy Elena in Uncle Vanya, and to a large degree helps to both explain and complicate Trigorin’s pursuit of the beautiful Nina in The Seagull. As Dorn comments, “True beauty is always a serious matter.” Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 8 Belles lettres is a restful and sacred thing. The narrative form is one’s lawful wife, while the dramatic form is a showy, noisy, impertinent, and tiresome mistress. –Chekhov, in a letter to Nikolai Pleshcheyev (January 1889) Chekhov and the Theater In the English-speaking world, Chekhov is chiefly remembered as a playwright; it would be difficult to find a member of the theater-going public who had never seen a performance of Uncle Vanya or The Cherry Orchard. However, within Russia, Chekhov is revered primarily as a prose writer, the father of the modern short story, who happened to venture into drama towards the end of his life. It would be impossible to find a university-educated Russian who had not at some point read “The Lady with a Lapdog” and “Anna on the Neck” and “Gooseberries.” Chekhov himself was characteristically ambivalent about writing for the theater. He had first attempted to write a full- length play in 1880, the manuscript now known as Platonov, but was never able to finish it. By the time he was ready to seriously consider drama, he was already one of the most famous prose writers in Russia, having received the prestigious Pushkin Literary Prize in 1887. The publicity accompanying the award marked the height of Chekhov’s fame and popularity with the literary public. And so it was with great fanfare that the Korsh Theater in Moscow commissioned his second attempt at serious playwrighting, Ivanov (A Drama in Four Acts) (1887). Chekhov had high hopes that it would mark his debut as a serious dramatist. However, the public and critical responses were wildly mixed. Chekhov’s brother Mikhail described Ivanov’s opening night as “pandemonium: wild, ecstatic cheering, violent booing, fist fights in the buffet, patrons ejected from the theater.” Part of the problem was the audience’s expectations of comedy from the well-known humorist, despite the play’s subtitle. Ivanov’s controversial premiere can later be seen as an important vehicle for change, both for Chekhov as a playwright and for the Moscow theater scene. However, it was a disappointment for Chekhov, who judged the play a failure, as shown in a December 1888 letter to his publisher and mentor Alexey Suvorin: I do not know how to write a play…If on paper my characters have not come out alive and clear, the fault is not in them but in my inability to express my thoughts. It means that it is still too early for me to start writing plays. A week later, he continued his train of thought on his lack of readiness as a dramatist in a second letter to Suvorin, writing, “I was on the right track [in the writing of Ivanov], but the execution wasn’t worth a damn. I should have waited!…One must be mature—that’s the first thing; and second of all, one must have a feeling of personal freedom, and that feeling has only recently begun to develop in me.” Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 9 Chekhov’s main dramatic influence before the 1890s was Shakespeare, whom he read in translation and admired greatly in his twenties. Tolstoy, who by the 1890s found his former disciple straying far from their formerly shared ideas on morality and sexuality, famously grouped the two together in an unintended compliment: “Really, I can’t stand your plays. Shakespeare wrote badly, but you write worse.” (The influence of Hamlet in particular on The Seagull will be explored in section “Sources for The Seagull”.) However, in an attempt to hasten his maturity as a playwright, during the 1890s Chekhov expanded his reading to contemporary Western European drama. He became familiar not only with Ibsen (cf. his play Wild Duck) and Maeterlinck, but also with Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Hauptmann’s Lonely People. These writers pulled Chekhov into the stream of innovation taking hold of the theater. In a letter to Suvorin in 1892, he wrote of the problem of how to end a play without giving in to theatrical convention: “Whoever invents new endings for plays will open a new era. The damned endings won’t come! The hero either gets married or shoots himself.” The pressure to create “new forms” in the theater (also voiced by Treplev), as he had in prose, threw Chekhov into a pattern for the rest of the 1880s and in to the 1890s of moving between the two poles of appearing to give up on playwrighting (with little regret) and earnestly trying again to create a work which would redeem him as a dramatist. In February 1888 he wrote to the critic Polonsky, “No matter how hard I try to be serious, nothing ever comes of it, and all my serious efforts are mingled with insipidity,” though later that year flippantly told the writer Shcheglov, “I have no love for the stage.” His frustration is evident in a January 1889 letter to the writer Pleshcheyev: “Formerly, I didn’t give a damn about my play [Ivanov] and regarded it with condescending irony: I wrote it and to hell with it. But now when all of a sudden I found it in the works again, I realized what a bad job of writing it actually was.” A few years later, he appears ready to renounce playwrighting altogether, writing to Suvorin, “I do not intend to write dramas. I don’t care for the work” (November 1893). Part of his frustration also stemmed from the fact that writing plays proved considerably more difficult and time-consuming for Chekhov than writing stories. In March 1886, he was able to write to the then- famous writer Dmitry Grigorovich: I cannot recall one single story on which I worked more than a day; “The Huntsman,” the one you like so much, was written in a bathhouse! As reporters dash off their notes about fires, so I write my stories, mechanically, unconsciously, caring nothing either about the reader or myself. It’s important to remember that Chekhov’s writing career began as a means to support his family, and so had learned early on how to produce stories at a prodigious rate. After Ivanov, however—which Chekhov boasted he had written in less than two weeks—it took him months to produce each play. Although his worsening health caused by the progression of his tuberculosis certainly played a part, the primary cause of Chekhov’s ambivalence toward the genre of drama was his inability to produce plays in that same state of “unconsciousness,” of not caring about the audience’s reactions. Chekhov Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 10 verbalized his inability to write plays unselfconsciously to Suvorin in May 1895, as he began the process of writing The Seagull: I am not destined to be a playwright. I have no luck at it. But I’m not sad over it, for I can still go on writing stories. In that sphere I feel at home; but when I write a play, I feel uneasy, as though someone were peering over my shoulder. In her recent book Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey, Janet Malcolm explores this literary claustrophobia endemic to writing plays which so powerfully affected Chekhov: Of course, writing a play is never as private an act as writing a story or a novel. As he works, the playwright feels a crowd of actors, directors, scenery designers, costumers, lighting specialists, and sometimes even an audience at his back. He is never alone, and he evidently likes the company. But, just as Chekhov never resolved his ambivalence toward actual guests, so he never resolved his ambivalence toward the imaginary figures who, peering over his shoulders when he wrote for the theater, inhabited him as he was not inhabited when he wrote stories. The collaborative nature of the theater both “drew and repelled Chekhov in equal measure,” as Malcolm writes, and the difficulties of dramatic production would haunt him to the end of his life. Though he had written hundreds of stories, Chekhov still nurtured a certain belief in the exhaustibility of his subject matter, and to a certain degree never stopped begrudging plays the time and effort they took. Before the disastrous premiere of The Seagull in 1896 (discussed in detail in the next section), which would greatly exacerbate Chekhov’s distrust of his “tiresome mistress,” he wrote to Suvorin, “Ah, why have I written plays and not stories! Subjects have been wasted, wasted to no purpose, scandalously and unproductively.” In any event, Chekhov remains beloved and remembered as a pla ywright, something all the more astounding when one considers that he produced only four plays which are widely believed to demonstrate his genius. But with those four plays, he did indeed help to find new theatrical forms, and reinvigorate the Russian theater. And he found them with the help of those characteristics which helped him create the modern short story. Much of Chekhov’s success is due to his subtlety. Vladimir Nabokov writes, “Chekhov was the first among writers to rely so much upon the undercurrent of suggestion to convey a definite meaning.” Professor Milton Ehle agrees; Chekhov, he writes, continued to avoid the 19th-century temptations towards didacticism—the need to “teach and preach.” Instead, his great insight lies in the realization that “we reveal ourselves in the ordinary moments of our daily living.” Anatoly Smeliansky, current Associate Director of the Moscow Art Theater, puts it another way: the naturalistic effects of Chekhov’s plays, so crucial to the development of MAT’s aesthetic credo, “create a powerful sense of the flow of life.” Chekhov bases his revolution in the theater on an idea commonplace to us now, but radical a century ago: that the dramatic focus in plays should not be the drama in life, but the drama of life. Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 11 I’m going to write something strange. –Chekhov, in a letter to Suvorin (May 1995) The Seagull’s History Chekhov began working on the basic structure of what would become The Seagull in the spring of 1895. By the fall, the final form of the play had taken shape. In October, he wrote to Suvorin: Can you imagine it—I am writing a play which I shall probably not finish before the end of November. I am writing it not without pleasure, though I abuse the conventions of the stage terribly. It’s a comedy, there are three women’s parts, six men’s parts, four acts, landscapes (view over a lake); a great deal of conversation about literature, very little action, lots of love. By November 1895, Chekhov had finished the first draft. Under his usual veneer of flippancy towards the significance of his attempts at playwrighting, there appears a sense of excitement and anticipation in Chekhov’s next letter to Suvorin that he might have indeed have discovered the “new forms” Treplev would also seek: I began it “forte” and ended it “pianissimo”—contrary to all the rules of dramatic art. It came out more like a long tale. I am more dissatisfied than satisfied with it, and reading over my newborn play, once again I am convinced that I am not a dramatist at all. The acts are very short, and there are four of them…I’ll send you a copy. Only don’t let anyone else read it. In September of 1896, The Seagull was given approval to be staged by the government theatrical censor. It was too late for the play to be included in Moscow’s prestigious Maly Theater’s repertory for the current season, which is what Chekhov had wanted. Instead it was offered to the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, which scheduled its premiere as part of a benefit performance for the great comic actress Elena Levkeeva. The Seagull was in fact offered as the first half of a double bill, after which Levkeeva was appearing in a traditional vaudeville comedy, therefore creating an expectation for the audience of an evening of broad, popular entertainment. As if this weren’t enough to set the stage for a disaster, the play was only rehearsed for nine days prior to its premiere; at the helm the theater placed a novice director, who cast the play with actors who (with the exception of the gifted actress Vera Kommissarzhevskaya, playing Nina) didn’t understand the text or its author and his ambitions toward new dramatic forms. And so, in a tale famous in theater lore, it came to be that on the evening of October 17, 1896, Chekhov suffered the worst literary failure of his life. As Janet Malcolm writes, the audience “expected hilarity and, to their disbelief and growing outrage, got Symbolism.” In response the audience booed and jeered, and derisively laughed during Nina’s monologue in Act I. The press reviews were savage: a theater critic for the Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 12 Bourse News said the play was “not The Seagull but simply a wild fowl.” Chekhov hid in the actors’ dressing rooms after the first act, fled the theater, and wandered through the city in a daze, leaving early the next morning for Moscow. Despondent, before he could leave Moscow for Melikhovo, his small estate, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin on October 18th : “Stop the publication of my plays. I shall never forget last evening…I shall not have that play produced in Moscow, ever. Never again shall I write plays or have them staged.” The second and third nights of The Seagull’s performances were already sold out, and the theater was packed with members of Petersburg intelligentsia who came with more receptive expectations. In a dramatic turnaround, positive criticism began to appear in the newspapers, and before long the play was received as a triumph by critics and audience members alike. However, Chekhov, still traumatized over the play’s horrible first-night reception, ignored all the positive news mailed and telegraphed to him by his friends and well- wishers. In December, he wrote to Suvorin (who had convinced Chekhov to go ahead with publication of his plays) about his pain caused by October 17th : I feel nothing but loathing for my plays, and it is an effort for me to read the proofs. Again you’ll say that this is silly, and unreasonable, that it is conceit, pride, etc. etc. I know, but what can I do, tell me? I would gladly rid myself of that stupid feeling, but I cannot, I simply cannot. The reason is not that my play was a failure; indeed, that is true of most of my plays and every time it’s like water off a duck’s back. No—on October 17th , it was not my play, but I myself who failed. For quite a while, Chekhov firmly believed that the Petersburg premiere of The Seagull had finished him as a playwright, as is evident in his January 1899 letter to Kommisarzhevskaya: My Seagull is being performed for the eighth time now in Moscow, and the theater is filled to overflowing every night. They say that the play is unusually well-directed, and that actors play their roles beautifully…Even so, I haven’t the slightest desire to write any more plays. The Petersburg theater cured me of that. Of course, he would go on to write three more plays—in fact, by the time of this letter he had already adapted Uncle Vanya from his earlier play The Wood Demon, and it had been staged in the provinces. However, even after he began to accept the reality of The Seagull’s success, the scars of the Petersburg premiere made him ever more wary of the difficulties of writing for the theater, and made the process of playwrighting even more arduous and beset with doubts. ***** In May of 1897, while Chekhov was in Melikhovo, licking his wounds from the debacle of The Seagull’s premiere while harboring hopes for what would become Uncle Vanya, an historic event was taking place at the Slavyansky Bazaar, the famous Moscow hotel Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 13 and restaurant where Trigorin instructs Nina to take a room. The playwright-director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and the producer-actor Konstantin Stanislavsky held a meeting that lasted 18 hours to discuss their ideas for the radical transformation of the Russian theater, resulting in the birth of the Moscow Art Theater (MAT). MAT was a nucleus of actors dedicated to a new school of naturalistic acting, whose purpose was to break with the old conventions of the stage. Nemirovich believed in the genius of The Seagull, claimed it was the only play that excited him (and that Chekhov was the only contemporary author of value), and, in a flurry of correspondence, convinced the battlescarred Chekhov to allow MAT to stage the play in its inaugural season. And so The Seagull premiered for a second time on December 17, 1898. The entire cast had taken valerian drops to try to calm their nerves. According to Stanislavsky’s rather melodramatic memoirs, Chekhov’s “spiritual condition was such that if The Seagull should fail as it did at its first production in Petersburg, the great poet would not be able to weather the blow”—that is, that any failure on the part of the theater would literally kill Chekhov. When the curtain fell on Act I, there was complete silence in the theater. Olga Knipper, the young actress playing Arkadina, fainted, and the actors endured long seconds of anguish. Just then, the audience erupted into a roar of applause and “mad ovation,” and the actors took their bows dazed and with tears running down their faces, a scenario which repeated itself after each act. Although the Moscow Art Theater had experienced some success before that night, it really only came into its own through its production of The Seagull. In Nabokov’s description, the theater “reached a new height of artistic perfection through Chekhov’s plays which made it famous.” The creation of the play had in fact played much the same role in Chekhov’s own development as a playwright: in 1898, the play cemented the reputation of both MAT and Chekhov, and the theater would stage the pla y 63 times in total It was a symbiosis unusual in the history of the theater. The seagull became the symbol MAT, its image reproduced on the theater’s curtains and programs; MAT soon became known more colloquially as “Chekhov’s theater.” The theater staged the premieres of Chekhov’s last three plays—Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard—and Olga Knipper, who in 1901 would marry the elusive writerbachelor, made her career playing Chekhov’s heroines. The Seagull is nonsense, nothing about it is true. It is altogether very weak. --Tolstoy, commenting to Chekhov on his dramatic work Though Treplev’s play may have failed, The Seagull clearly succeeded in its quest for new dramatic forms. It created an important model for Chekhov’s three subsequent plays, in its display of the absurdity of human behavior, and its skillful mixing of the comic and the tragic. The play also contains within it the stylistic elements which would help create the naturalistic school of acting for which the Moscow Art Theater would be best known: his use of the pause, the intimate interaction of the characters, the creation of a true cast ensemble, and the stress on realistic stage effects. Chekhov and MAT together Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 14 created a theater of “art dedicated to life,” dedicated to “the idea that the part should project out of the play so that the actor entered into his role as a new personality to be lived from birth to death in every trivial action,” as described by Donald Rayfield. Perhaps even more importantly, The Seagull confronts crucial questions of freedom and determinism. As Milton Ehle writes, after we are introduced to the set-up of the love triangles at the beginning of the play, we expect the plot to follow the traditional line of the mixed-up love story. But instead of a neat resolution à la A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which all the lovers find their proper partners, the play ends with the hero and heroine going their separate ways, and the unrequited love of the various love triangles remaining unrequited. The Seagull is essentially a play constructed around unsatisfied longing; as Ehle says, “It is as if Chekhov’s characters willfully ignore the plot that destiny and art have woven for them.” Though the characters in The Seagull are often described as weak, they are in fact asserting their freedom in refusing to be governed by an impersonal, controlling master plot. Nabokov agrees with this interpretation: [Chekhov’s] achievement [in The Seagull] was that he showed the right way to escape the dungeon of deterministic causation, of cause and effect, and burst the bars holding the art of drama captive. The Seagull, therefore, becomes the vehicle for Chekhov’s manifesto of artistic freedom. Chekhov had his entire life distrusted political groups and overarching philosophies in his belief in the individual’s right to find his own path. He agrees with Treplev that plays which offer “some kind of moral, some nice easy little moral, something you wouldn’t mind having around the house” are a sure indicator of a morally bankrupt art form. It is not the determinism, but the cracks in the determinism that matter in finding meaning in life. In Ehle’s words, for Chekhov, “life can only ever be remade as an act of human freedom.” [Chekhov’s] stories and plays—even the darkest among them—are hymns of praise. –Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 15 You ask: what is life? That’s exactly like asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known about it. –Chekhov, in a letter to Olga Knipper (April 1904) Sources for The Seagull My collections of stories are Motley Stories, Twilight, Stories, Gloomy People, and the novella The Duel. I have also sinned in the realm of drama, although moderately. –Chekhov, fro m his infamous “autobiography” written for Tikhonov (1892) The Gossip: Biographical Sources for Plot and Character Lydia Mizinova, nicknamed “Lika,” is the first of three Lydias in Chekhov’s life to provide material for The Seagull. Mizinova was a friend of Chekhov’s sister Masha; her unrequited love for Chekhov drove her into the arms of the writer Potapenko. In 1894 the two ran off to Europe together, but when Mizinova became pregnant, Potapenko, who was married to his second wife, abandoned her cold-heartedly in Switzerland. Mizinova’s infant died three weeks following The Seagull’s St. Petersburg premiere, echoing the fate of Nina’s child in a sad instance of life imitating art. The second Lydia, Lydia Avilova, a pretty young St. Petersburg wife and aspiring short story writer, pursued Chekhov romantically with great determination. In 1947, more than four decades after his death, she published a detailed memoir chronicaling her longtime tortured love affair with Chekhov; the affair has since been proven to be a complete fiction. Avilova gave Chekhov a medallion inscribed with the with a page and line number from his latest collection; it referred to a line from his 1891 story “Neighbors”: “If you should need my life, come and take it.” Chekhov not only used the line and its delivery through a story reference verbatim in the play for Nina’s gift to Trigorin, but he actually loaned the medallion to the prop master for the St. Petersburg production. To Avilova’s horror, he ultimately gave the medallion away to the talented actress who first portrayed Nina, Vera Kommisarzhevskaya, as a memento of her performance. The character Arkadina is based upon the third Lydia from Chekhov’s life, Lydia Yavorskaya, a flamboyant and ruthless actress with whom Chekhov had a two- year affair. Self-centered in the extreme, Yavorskaya had also married beneath her class in Kiev at the beginning of her career, starred in La Dame aux camélias, and, apparently, once begged Chekhov on her knees not to leave her. Vladimir Suvorin, the younger son of Chekhov’s publisher, mentor, and friend Alexey Suvorin, shot himself when he was twenty-one years old. Even before he would use Vladimir’s suicide as a model for Treplev’s, Chekhov wrote a story in 1888 called “Volodya” (a nickname for “Vladimir”), in which the hero shoots himself as a protest of his mother’s social lies and pretensions, and due to his despair over his own clumsy sexuality. In addition, Chekhov named the Zarechnys’ dog, Trezor, after Suvorin’s. Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 16 The manic-depressive landscape artist Isaac Levitan provided much fertile material for The Seagull. In 1892, on a hunting trip with Chekhov, Levitan pointlessly shot a woodcock; Chekhov recorded the unfeeling event in a letter to Suvorin, writing, “One less beautiful, lo ving creature on this earth, while two fools returned home and sat down to supper.” In the summer of 1895, Levitan grazed his temple with a revolver bullet in a suicide attempt, after being discovered by his lover Anna Turchaninova to have seduced her daughter. In an effort to aid his friend’s recovery, Chekhov traveled to the Turchaninov family estate, located in the north and situated by a lake filled with seagulls. Keep in mind: as members of Russia’s literary and theatrical elite, all of these people— Mizinova, Potapenko, Potapenko’s wife, Avilova, Yavorskaya, Suvorin, and Levitan— either attended the St. Petersburg premiere of The Seagull or attended an earlier reading of the play staged in Moscow. Finally, Chekhov himself shared several of Trigorin’s defining characteristics: a love of fishing; the drive to compulsively write, day and night; a deep concern for his place in the literary canon—Chekhov’s letters to Suvorin from 1892-3 contain anxious selfcomparison; and the unfavorable comparison by others with Zola, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, in which Chekhov often came up short by the standards of the 1880s and 1890s, which judged artists first by the zeal of social commitment and secondly by their talent. Chekhov was shy and taciturn, except one-on-one, and often described as disarmingly polite, all characteristics of Trigorin. However, perhaps the way in which Trigorin most resembles Chekhov is in his relentless need to steal from his life to feed his art, in his use of his fellow characters’ personal lives in his writing, his “autobiographophobia” notwithstanding. Always remember that the writers who we call eternal, or even just simply the good ones who intoxicate us, they all have one highly important trait in common: they are moving toward something, and they beckon you to follow, and you feel—not only with your mind, but with your entire being—that they have some purpose, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come to disturb the imagination without reason. –Chekhov, in a letter to Suvorin (1892) The Hamlet Subtext Shakespeare remained the dramatological gold standard for Chekhov throughout his playwrighting life. In 1882, at 22 years of age, he published a passionate literary article on Hamlet (which he had read, like all of Shakespeare, in translation). In the article he called for Shakespeare to be performed everywhere in Russia, in order to educate young actors and let in fresh air on the then-stagnant Russian stage. The Seagull, the first play in which Chekhov really comes into maturity as a playwright, bears the strongest traces of Hamlet of all of the four final plays. First of all, Chekhov emphasizes the Oedipal aspect of the Hamlet-Gertrude relationship in the relationship between Treplev and Arkadina. We first see Treplev plucking petals Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 17 off a daisy to see whether his mother loves him, as opposed to our expectation that he might use the daisy to more appropriately learn about Nina. Act I also contains Hamlet’s erotically charged confrontation with Gertrude, quoted specifically to one another by Chekhov’s mother and son. As Paul Schmidt notes, this scene is a set-up for the emotionally charged bandaging scene in Act III, itself a parody of the frankly erotic Gertude-Hamlet closet scene. Treplev confesses to Arkadina, “The last few days, I’ve loved you the way I did when I was little. Totally, tenderly. You’re all I’ve got. Only there’s that man—he always comes between us!” Even after it becomes clear to Treplev and Arkadina that their respective lovers are falling in love with each other, Treplev still shows more concern that Trigorin will get in the way of his relationship with his mother as opposed to with Nina. In a reference to Laertes and Hamlet’s duel at the end of the play, Trigorin reveals at the beginning of Act III that Treplev has challenged him to a duel. Although the issue in contention might at first glance appear to be Nina/Ophelia, it’s clear that Trigorin has only flirted with Nina by the end of Act II—the seduction will take place in Moscow, between Acts III and IV. Therefore, the implication is that this challenge to a duel must have stemmed either from Treplev’s artistic jealousy, or, just as likely, from Treplev’s resulting jealousy over Trigorin’s sexual appropriation of Arkadina. Trigorin twice plays the part of Claudius to Treplev’s Hamlet, effectively usurping Treplev’s place in both Arkadina’s and Nina’s hearts. And though Treplev’s tries to assign the identity of Hamlet on Trigorin when he enters the room reading in Act II, in doing so he is forced to utter Hamlet’s line, “Words, words, words…,” thus further demonstrating his own better suitedness to the role. The comic, pathetic Sorin, a ghost of the person he always wishes to be, is the stand- in for Hamlet’s father, though he can offer his “son” Treplev no good advice when Treplev describes his mother’s shortcomings. The Seagull also refers directly to Hamlet with Hamlet/Treplev’s play-within- the-play device. To test Claudius’ conscience and communicate with his mother, Hamlet chooses the play The Mousetrap, saying, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of a king.” Similarly, Treplev’s play is a direct challenge to his mother and the theatrical conventions of her generation, a mousetrap of sorts in which, through her adherence to an outdated theatrical style, she shows the age she is normally so cautious to hide (and for which she resents the presence of Treplev). Like Hamlet and Ophelia, Treplev and Nina’s love affair has already peaked before the beginning of the pla y, and we learn about it chiefly through the comments of others. The relationship is already under some strain when we first meet the lovers—in Hamlet the strain results from the death of the king and Hamlet’s growing suspicions towards his uncle, and in The Seagull from the appearance of Arkadina and her successful younger writer. Treplev’s pointless killing and presentation of the seagull to Nina, along with his accusations of her unfaithfulness (a transference of his anger over his mother’s unfaithfulness to him) echo Hamlet’s cruel torment of the bewildered Ophelia for the sins of Gertrude’s sexuality. To the very end of the play, Treplev regrets his vascillating behavior towards Nina, but seems powerless to stop it. Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 18 Nina is otherwise strongly connected with Ophelia: she hands out flowers to Dorn and at the end of the play appears to have come mentally unhinged. Trigorin uses her for the production of his fiction in the same way that Polonius uses Ophelia to try to ensnare Hamlet. Though she doesn’t drown herself, her constant association with water evokes Ophelia’s watery end: she is drawn to the lake, leaves Konstantin’s study in a rainstorm, and even asks for a glass of water before she goes, as if to really make the point. Nina herself makes the connection with Rusalka, Alexander Pushkin’s poem about a seduced, impregnated, and abandoned maiden who drowns in a river. Finally, the Maupassant piece Arkadina, Dorn, and Masha are reading aloud is Sur l’eau. Hamlet was a central figure for many Russian writers, because of the development of the literary archetype of the “superfluous man” (lishnii chelovek), an educated, well- meaning protagonist who is powerless to act. Both Treplev and Sorin fulfill this role, both of them “un homme qui a voulu.” Hamlet is so incapacitated that he is even unable to commit to taking his own life. Nina’s quotation from Turgenev’s Rudin, however, provides a different path for Treplev, since Rudin, a prototypical superfluous man, ends his short life after his youthful dreams fail to come to fruition. While Hamlet endlessly contemplates suicide, Treplev finally carries it out. A final note on Oedipus : after Nina leaves the manor at the end of the play, still desperately in love with Trigorin, Treplev utters his last line before committing suicide: “I hope nobody sees her in the garden and tells Mama. Mama would get upset.” Chekhov demonstrates that once it becomes clear that Nina will never love him again, and he has destroyed all of his creative work, all Treplev has left is his dysfunctional relationship with a woman apparently incapable of expressing love towards anyone but herself. (Much of this material on The Seagull’s Hamlet subtext is adapted from Richard Peace’s pioneering work on the subject, Chekhov: A Study of the Four Plays.) Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 19 [Chekhov’s works] have a straightforward, natural, rational, modern surface; they have been described as modest, delicate, gray. In fact they are wild and strange, archaic and brilliantly painted. But the wildness and strangeness and archaism and brilliant colors are concealed, as are the complexity and difficulty. –Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey Notes on The Seagull This additional “commentary” to The Seagull simply provides some additional background information and a few disconnected and somewhat random observations on the text to Paul Schmidt’s notes on pp. 161-164. It was quite a game among Russians to divide their acquaintances into those who liked Chekhov and those who did not. Those who did not were not the right sort. –Vladimir Nabokov Act I One quibble with Paul Schmidt’s excellent translation: The Seagull does not take place at Sorin’s farm, but rather on his estate, and in this act not on the back lawn but on a part of the manorial park. A farm with a back yard conjures up quite a different image than the one we need of a gentry manor in the country. Treplev’s play comes up on the first page, so we understand almost from the very beginning that The Seagull is going to be a play about plays. That Chekhov would want to want to write about art and the nature of artists may be hardly surprising, following the complete critical failure in 1889 of The Wood Demon, the play upon which much of Uncle Vanya would later be re- modeled. The outer play The Seagull and Treplev’s inner play mirror one another in their relationship to nature and artifice. On the one hand, Treplev is making use of a natural backdrop (the lake, the moon, etc.) to illustrate something eternal and highly abstract, the universal soul, in his play. On the other hand, the action of The Seagull on the larger main stage, which employs “fake” theatrical devices like the fourth wall, props, costumes, a script, etc., conveys a feeling of naturalness—the “drama of life,” as Smeliansky put it. The connection between Treplev’s play and his own is made in all seriousness by Chekhov. Like Treplev, he, too is looking for new forms to transform traditional Russian theater, which by the 1890s has become highly mannered and conventional. The Seagull resemb les Treplev’s play in that it uses symbols (the seagull, the lake, flowers) to try to understand eternal and abstract concepts like love and art. To further connect the two plays, Chekhov told Stanislavsky that he wanted the smell of sulfur and the imagery of the cold and satanic spirits from Treplev’s play to linger over the rest of Act I. Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 20 Chekhov wrote that The Seagull contained “lots of love,” and the first act establishes the various love triangles: Medvedenko – Masha – Treplev, Treplev – Arkadina – Trigorin (the Treplev – Nina – Trigorin love triangle comes later), and Paulina – Dorn – Arkadina/Nina/every other woman in town. (In an earlier draft of the play, it was made clear that Dorn is in fact Masha’s real father, which would explain why she feels close to him.) Medvedenko is one of the many teachers with no real connection to learning at whom Chekhov pokes fun in his ouevre. His embrace of a sort of crude proto-Socialism leads to his inability to see the world in anything but economic terms. His name derives from the word for “bear,” medved’ , which underscores his lumbering awkwardness when speaking to Masha of love and the uniting of souls—particularly since he later puts forth the view that the soul may be nothing more than a collection of atoms. Medvedenko gains some sympathy as a character in the fourth act as the only member of the family to show any concern to his infant son, but his refusal to confront Masha about her cruel neglect also invokes our pity and scorn. The tragicomic character Sorin is The Seagull’s representative of the landed gentry class, depicted in the last stages of their decline. Poor Sorin has never lived the kind of life he wanted: he finds living in the country distasteful, always looks hung over, never had any luck with the ladies, and served for 28 boring years in the state bureaucracy as a State Councillor. More sadly, he never attained either of his two goals of becoming a writer or marrying. Sorin sings badly and speaks poorly, and his estate manager tyrannizes over him, refusing him the use of his carriage horses or a night’s peace from the barking watchdog. Perhaps even more importantly, no one ever responds to Sorin’s melancholy observations on the deficiencies of his life—even his doctor refuses to take his complaints seriously and simply prescribes valerian drops and aspirin. Though Dorn scolds him, Sorin does gain some relief in smoking cigars and drinking sherry, since they allow him to take on a new identity, away from his own failed life. There is a strong sense from the other characters that Sorin has outlived his usefulness. This is illustrated most poignantly in the following exchange in Act IV: Sorin exclaims passionately to Dorn, “Can’t you understand? I want to live!” and Dorn coldly answers, “That’s silly too. All life must end—that’s a law of nature.” As was discussed in the previous section, Sorin serves as a mirror for Treplev, another “homme qui a voulu.” By Act IV, it would certainly be clear to Treplev that Sorin to a large degree represents what has in store for him, perhaps aiding his decision to commit suicide. Nina is the first one to make the comparison between herself and the seagull, noting her intense attraction to the lake. In Act III, Trigorin tells us that she wears a white dress in Act II; she is often costumed in a long, flowing white dress in Act I as well, to emphasize her connection with the seagull. Her appearance in white provides a sharp contrast to Masha’s black mourning garb. Nina’s last name, “Zarechnaya,” is derived from the Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 21 Russian word for “dawn,” zarya. She herself represents the dawn of possibility for many things for the various male characters (save Medvedenko)—love, artistic creation, the optimism of youth—but threatens to derail the plans and hopes of Masha, Paulina, and Arkadina. [Chekhov’s] literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. –Vladimir Nabokov Act II The line from Gounod’s opera Faust (“Faites-lui mes aveux, portez mes voeux…”) which Dorn sings twice during this act is from an aria situated just before Faust, with Mephistopheles’ deadly help, seduces Marguerite. The reference to Trigorin and Nina is clear, though in some ways Nina is the stand- in for Faust in place of Trigorin: she trades her innocence and purity for the chance to try to experience fame and artistic creation through another person. Chekhov lays bare the device of the seagull as a symbol when Nina recognizes it as such but says, “Well, excuse me, but I don’t quite get it.” Of course, Nina can’t “get it,” since at the time Treplev shoots and lays the dead bird at her feet, the seagull is an empty symbol, devoid of any connotation for Nina to interpret. Trigorin must first appropriate Treplev’s symbol and its human representative (who also once belonged to Treplev), and act out with her his short story about the seagull, in order to imbue the symbol with meaning that can be “read” and understood, as she certainly does by the end of the play. Trigorin’s long speech about his experience of compulsive artistic creation, in which he describes using the elements around him in future stories (the piano-shaped cloud, the heliotrope, his conversation with Nina), is echoed in comments made by Chekhov to the writer Vladimir Korolenko, recalled in Korolenko’s memoir: “Do you know how I write my little stories? Here!…” He glanced at the table, took the first object his hand happened to come across—it was an ashtray—put it in front of me, and said: “Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll have a story entitled ‘The Ashtray.’” Chekhov succeeds so well in rendering his illusion of realism and in hiding the traces of his surrealism that he remains the most misunderstood—as well as the most beloved—of the nineteenth-century Russian geniuses. In Russia, no less than in our country, possibly even more than in our country, Chekhov attracts a kind of sickening piety. You utter the name “Chekhov” and people arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room. –Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 22 Act III The third act drives home the depths to which Arkadina will stoop to serve her own interests. The act employs a classic vaudeville technique, in which the same scene is repeated three times, each time with the same outcome: Arkadina’s victory. First of all, Arkadina’s wish that Sorin not go to town with her and Trigorin is granted by his poor health. In her refusal to grant her brother’s request that she give a little of her 70,000 rubles in the bank to Treplev for clothes or traveling, she demonstrates the extent of her meanness and the phoniness of her flimsy excuses. The scene then repeats itself, as Arkadina refuses Treplev’s request that she lend Sorin a couple of thousand rubles so he can escape to town; to Treplev’s criticism of Trigorin, she responds with hateful comments about her son’s mediocre literary talents and petty bourgeois father. The third variation of the scene involves Arkadina’s refusal to generously give up Trigorin to Nina. Instead, she degrades herself, embracing his knees, invoking every histrionic trick in the book in a calculated attempt to get him to leave the estate with her. Arkadina’s flattery is so overblown and servile—“you’re the greatest writer alive, you’re the only hope of Russia”—that Trigorin’s final acquiescence to it damages him considerably as character, lowering him our eyes as a coward. When we learn of his mistreatment of Nina in Act IV, the behavior seems more consistent with what we have learned about him. In flattering Trigorin, Arkadina says of his writing, “One line, that’s all it takes, and you have it all—you create living human beings!” The reason Trigorin’s characters seem so “alive,” of course, is that Trigorin cannibalizes the lives of his friends and acquaintances to create his characters and plots—much like Chekhov did in The Seagull. In addition to the story of love and betrayal he first imagines and then enacts with Nina, Trigorin consumes the stories of the staging of Treplev’s play, Masha’s of unrequited love for Treplev, and Treplev’s suicide attempt (as related by Masha). The only redeeming feature in his consumption of people for fiction is his complete honesty about it. In Act II, Trigorin announces his intentions toward using Nina for prose material right off the bat, when he explains that he wants to get to know her better because girls of 18 or 19 never “ring quite right” in his fiction. This blatant display of literary cannibalization allows Chekhov to compare Trigorin and Treplev: in Act I Nina complains that’s it’s difficult to act in Treplev’s play that there are no “ordinary people” in it, while in Act IV Trigorin reports that the critics have attacked Treplev’s prose for—again—its lack of “ordinary people.” This noted lack in his literary output indicates that Treplev, for better and for worse, has not learned how to consume the experiences of people in his life and translate them into art. I shall go further and say that the person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of Russian literature and Russian life, and, which is far more important, the essentials of universal literary art. –Vladimir Nabokov Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 23 Act IV Masha and Medvedenko’s entrance onstage repeats their entrance in Act I: this time, instead of dialectical materialism, Medvedenko fails to interest Masha in the well-being of her own infant son. Again Medvedenko is left to walk several miles home. The repetition of the scene reinforces Masha’s realization that her attempts to “rip out by the roots” her love for Treplev is doomed to fail, no matter whom she has married or where they live. Masha is in effect repeating her mother’s life: married to a man she doesn’t love or respect, and in love with a man who doesn’t return her love. Paulina recognizes the cont inuation of the vicious cycle and tries to amend the situation, asking Treplev to be kind to her daughter, but only makes the situation worse by irritating Treplev and driving him away, just as she irritates Dorn with her incessant questions, jealousy, and pleading for a new life. Dorn proves himself to be perhaps the most consistently sympathetic characters in The Seagull, despite his fulfillment of the “superfluous man” role in his inability to actually take action on anyone’s behalf. He is the only character in Act I who recognizes Treplev’s talent, and encourages him to continue writing. During the play, Arkadina is too busy sneering and preening for attention, and Trigorin too busy noticing the beautiful Nina, to either of them pay attention to the play. This pattern repeats itself in Act IV: Dorn praises Treplev’s stories as beautiful, bright, and moving, creating “a strong first impression,” even if he has trouble ending them—the same trouble with the play whose ending was never heard (and one of Chekhov’s main struggles writing The Seagull). Arkadina declares she’s never read her son’s stories—“There’s just never enough time”; Trigorin, while he knows the critics’ opinions of Treplev, only cuts the journal pages of his own stories, indicating that he also has never read Treplev’s stories. Trigorin’s distilled evocation of a moonlit night, read out loud enviously by Treplev, is actually taken directly from Chekhov’s short story “The Wolf” (1886). Sadly, Treplev’s artistic breakthrough about content trumping forms comes only minutes before he feels compelled to burn all his drafts and kill himself. Trigorin has the bad taste not only to request that Shamrayev stuff Treplev’s dead seagull, as some kind of commemoration of the fact that he ruined and abandoned Nina “because he had nothing better to do,” but then has the nerve to forget that he ever made the request, much as he has likely forgotten his amoral behavior and any remorse. Nina, however, repeats “I am a seagull” several times during her final meeting with Treplev: she remembers everything and continues to love Trigorin, the always- lucky man, despite his cruel behavior and thoughtless return to his older, rich mistress. Non-speakers of Russian have tried to make the point before that it’s not totally clear at the end of The Seagull whether Treplev is actually dead or not, that he might have just wounded himself as before. This reading of the play’s ending as ambiguous (which disregards the doctor’s urgent directive to Trigorin to remove Arkadina from the estate) demonstrates the limitations of translation: the verb used here, zastrelilsya, is given in the past perfective, and would be translated literally (if clumsily) as “he shot himself dead.” Therefore, Chekhov leaves no question but that Treplev has indeed killed himself. Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 24 This name of mine is a celebrated one. In Russia it is known to every educated person, and in university halls abroad they preface it with “distinguished” and “honored.” –The narrator of Chekhov’s “A Dreary Story” (1889) A Guide to Russian Names Russian names tend to drive everyone reading Russian literature crazy, since it seems as if everyone has about 11 names, and they’re all at least five syllables long. (God help you if you’ve unwittingly picked up War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov.) The pronunciation is difficult, and they’re difficult to remember. It’s all the more frustrating discussing the dilemma with Russians themselves, the ones responsible for this whole mess: they don’t understand what the fuss is all about, since Russian names do indeed operate according to a system, however seemingly Byzantine to the outsiders. Following this little guide I’ve included Carol Rocamora’s excellent pronunciation guide to names and a few Russian words used in The Seagull, with slight modifications. Here are a few notes on the assignment, formation, and usage of Russian names. First Names Astonishingly, Russians are actually given only one name. Before the 1917 Revolution, the choices were limited to a list of saints’ names authorized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Each saint had a day on the Julian calendar, and those named after that saint celebrated this “name day” more commonly than their own birthdays. (Jews and other minorities within the Russian Empire were not held to these naming conventions.) However, Russians’ first names go through all sorts of mutations, based on their relationship with whomever is addressing them. For example: the character Masha’s formal name is Marya. Her mother, Paulina Andreyevna, most likely called her Mashenka and Marusenka when she was a little girl. Masha is the most common nickname of Maria; Masha can be addressed as such by friends of her own age, family, and those, like Sorin, who are in some way superior to her—in either age or class. Masha would be addressed by any servants as Marya Ilyinichna. For formal names, women’s names end in a and men’s in a consonant. However, almost all men’s nicknames end in a, like Konstantin Treplev’s nickname, Kostya. Last Names Russian names generally take on two forms: the masculine and the feminine. Like first names, women’s last names end in a, while men’s end in a consonant. Shamrayev’s wife is Paulina Shamrayeva, though she’s not named as such in the list of characters. Arkadina’s name follows the convention, as do Treplev’s, Sorin’s, Nina Zarechnaya’s, and Trigorin’s. Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 25 Exceptions: Poor, ineffective Semyon Medvedenko is saddled with a Ukrainian last name (denoting a lack of culture in imperialist Russia). Because it follows different rules, Masha’s last name after she marries him is Medvedenko, without changing to a feminine ending. If Dr. Dorn were ever to marry (highly unlikely), since his name is that of a naturalized German, his wife would also be Dorn, without a feminine ending. Middle Names Unlike the practice of many Western cultures, in which parents give their children first and middle names, as noted above, Russians only give their children their first names. The middle name is really an assigned patronymic, formed from the father’s name. Patronymics generally end in -evich/-ovich for men and -evna/-ovna for women. In common usage, patronymics often contract slightly, so that the doctor is sometimes called “Yevgeny Sergeich” instead of the more formal “Yevgeny Sergeyevich.” Even without the cast notes, we could make a good guess that Arkadina (Irina Nikolayevna) and Sorin (Pyotr Nikolayevich) are brother and sister, since they share the same patronymic—both of the them had the same father named Nikolai. Treplev’s patronymic, Gavrilovich, indicates that his father, the famous Ukrainian actor at one time married to Arkadina, was named Gavriil, or Gabriel, Treplev. Medvedenko’d patronymic tells us that he could rightly call himself Semyon Medvedenko, Jr., if he lived in the U.S. Name as an Indicator of Rank What the characters call one another indicates their power in relationship to one another. The use of first name alone and especially the nickname indicates either intimacy of some kind between the speakers or a condescension in rank. Yakov has no patronymic or last name listed in the roll of characters because none of the other characters would require them in addressing him: they’d simply call him “Yakov,” since he’s one of the workers (and probably the son of one of the serfs belonging to the Sorin estate before 1861). The most formal way to address anyone in Russian, even today, is by first name and patronymic. As the youngest and newest member of the group, Nina politely addresses almost anyone out of her age group in this manner. (This is why it’s important for Arkadina to give Nina all of Trigorin’s three names in their introduction, so that she can address him properly.) A few more examples: The younger generation generally call one another by their first names only, a sign of their equal footing, though Masha is able to avoid any intimacy with Medvedenko by never referring to him directly by name, and indirectly only by his last name. Arkadina coquettishly refers to Trigorin in front of other characters as both “Boris Alexeyich” and simply as “Boris,” retaining an appearance of propriety while at the same making their intimate connection quite clear. Arkadina also calls her brother “Petrushka,” a nickname that could denote either that she is very fond of him, or that she thinks of him as a small child, or both. For a more complete discussion of Russian names from all angles, see Genevra Gerhart’s excellent The Russian’s World (3rd ed., Slavica, 2001). Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 26 Pronunciation Guide Unlike English words, Russian words contain only one accent. By far the most important step in pronouncing Russian names is placing the accent in the correct place, indicated below by an accent mark (´). In general, accented e is pronounced as in yet, and accented o as in for. The combination ey rhymes with the word grey. THE SEAGULL: Cast of Characters Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina: Ee-ree´-na Nee-kah- lah´-yuhv- nuh Ahr-kah´-dee-nuh (ee rhymes with the English word seem; uh rhymes with the word putt) Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev: Kuhn-stahn-teen´ Gahv-ree´- luh-veech Tryep´- lyihf (Kost´- yuh) Pyotr Nikolayevich Sorin (Petrusha): Pyo´-tur Nee-kah-lah´-yuh-veech So´-reen (Pee-troo´-shuh) (oo rhymes with the word soon) Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaya: Nee´-nuh Mee-khai´- luhv-nuh Zah-ryech´- nuh-yuh (kh is a hard h sound, akin to Hebrew; khai rhymes with the word why) Ilya Afanasyevich Shamrayev: Eel- yah´ Uh-fah- nah´-syih- veech Shahm-rah´- yihf Paulina Andreyevna: (Note: This is the Anglicized spelling—in Russian, it’s “Polina”) Pah- lee´- nuh Ahn-drey´- yihf- nuh Masha (Marya Ilyinichna) (Mashenka): Mah´-shuh (Mah´-ryuh Eel- yeen´-eech-nuh) (Mah´-sheen-kuh) Boris Alexeyevich Trigorin: Bah-rees´ (NOT Bor´- is) Ah-leek-syey´-yee- veech Tree- go´-reen Yevgeny Sergeyevich (Sergeich) Dorn: Yeev-ge´-nee Syer- gey´-ee-veech (Syer-gey´-eech) Dorn Semyon Semyonovich Medvedenko: See-myon´ See- myon´- uh-veech Myeed-vyee-dyen´-ko Yakov: Yah´-kuhf Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 27 Other Russian Names Appearing in the Text: Chadin, Pavel Semyonich (Pashka): Chah´-deen, Pah´-veel See- myon´-eech (Pahsh´-kuh) Gogol: Grokholsky: Izmailov: Harkov: Mama: Matryona: Molchanovka: Nekrasov: Papa: Poltava: Rasplyuyev: Rusalka: Sadovsky: Slavyansky: Suzdaltsev: Trezor: Turgenev: Yelets: Yelisavetgrad: Go´-guhl Grah-hol´-skee Eez- mai´-luhf Khar´-kuhf Mah´-muh Mah-tryo´-nuh Mahl-chah´-nuhf-kuh Nee-krah´-suhf Pah´-puh Pahl-tah´-vuh Rahs-plyoo´-yihf Roo-sahl´-kuh Sah-dof´-skee Slah- vyahn´-skee Sooz´-duhl-tsihf Tree- zor´ Toor-ge´-nyihf Yee- lyets´ Yee- lee-suh- veet- graht´ (Taken and adapted slightly from Carol Rocamora’s Notes in her volume of translations Chekhov: Four Plays.) It’s hard to write a good play, and twice as hard to write a bad one. –Chekhov, in an 1889 letter to Suvorin Study Guide for Chekhov’s The Seagull, p. 28 Artistic literature is called artistic for the very reason that it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth—absolute and honest. –Chekhov, in an 1887 letter to Maria Kisleva, a family friend Bibliography Chekhov, Anton. Chekhov: Four Plays. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Carol Rocamora. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996. Ehle, Milton. “Introduction.” Chekhov for the Stage. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Kirk, Irina. Anton Chekhov. Twayne’s World Authors Series. Charles Moser, ed. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. Malcolm, Janet. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. New York: Random House, 2001. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)” in Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981, pp. 245-295. Peace, Richard. Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Rayfield, Donald. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and Drama. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. A History of Russia. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Smeliansky, Anatoly. “Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov . Ed. Vera Gottilieb and Paul Allain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 29-40. Stanislavski, Constantin. My Life in Art. Trans. J.J. Robbins. New York: Routledge/ Theatre Arts Books, 1996. First printing Little, Brown, and Company, 1924.