Anton Chekhov

Treplyov's one display of talent, his symbolist play located in a void where all things are extinct and the only conflicts are between the Universal Will and the Principle of Eternal Matter, may seem like parody. But Chekhov is careful to place the harsh criticism on the lips of Arkadina, whose taste and motives are suspect, and Nina, who complains that it is nothing but chitka, literally a 'reading,' a technical term she may have picked up from Arkadina. Chekhov is not ridiculing Treplyov for his espousal of new forms, something he himself had predicted might take a hundred years to evolve. Treplyov's shortcoming is his inability to preserve the purity of his ideal; his symbolist venture is actually a garble of popular stage techniques ill-connected to his poetic aspirations. The devil's red eyes are, as Arkadina observes, 'special effects'. His theatre, 'Curtain, first grooves, second grooves, and beyond that, empty space' is an amateur mock-up of Lentovsky's Fantasy Theatre in Moscow, relying on the gloom and the damp for atmosphere. He seems unable to find an original way of expressing his nebulous ideas; his play, like Bj0rnson's Beyond Human Power, 'has no significance because the idea isn't clear. It's impossible to make one's characters perform miracles, when you yourself have no sharply defined conviction as to miracles' (to Suvorin, 20 June 1896). In his notebooks, Chekhov stressed, 'Treplyov has no fixed goals and that's what destroyed him. Talent destroyed him'.

Chekhov, however, did manage in The Seagull to initiate his own new form, incomplete and transitional though it may be. For the first time, he did away with Trench scenes,' allowing each act to develop not through the artificial entrances and exits of characters, but by a concealed inner dynamic. The overall rhythm of the play is also carefully scored. 'I wrote it forte and ended it pianissimo, contrary to all the rules of dramatic art' (to Suvorin, 21 Nov. 1895). The forte passages occur in the first three acts, which are compressed to within a week's time; there is then the lapse of two years before the pianissimo of Act Four. The characters must fill in the gaps in their and our knowledge by the awkward device of asking one another what's been going on. But this apparently clumsy structure derives from Chekhov's anxiety to keep offstage what a traditional playwright would have saved for his obligatory scenes. The most intense and sensational actions - Nina's seduction and abandonment, the death of her child, Trigorin's return to Arkadina, - are, like Treplyov's two suicide attempts, left to our imagination. We are allowed to see the antecedents and consequences, as it were the foreplay and post-coital subsidence, but not the act itself.

The submergence of hyper-dramatic moments, the key to Chekhov's dramatic method, can be noticed halfway through Act One, after Treplyov has rung down the curtain on his play and stormed off. Eventually, Nina emerges from behind the stage, and Arkadina introduces her to Trigorin.

nina: Oh, I'm so pleased . . . (Embarrassed.) I read all your things.

arkadina (seating Nina beside her). Don't be bashful,

darling. He's a celebrity, but he doesn't put on airs. You see, he's bashful himself.

dorn: I presume we can raise the curtain now, it's spooky like this.

shamrayev (loudly). Yakov, haul up that curtain, boy!

(The curtain is raised.)

nina (to Trigorin). It's a strange play, isn't it?

trigorin: I didn't understand a word. Nevertheless, I did enjoy watching it. Your acting was so sincere. And the scenery was gorgeous. (Pause.) I suppose there are lots of fish in that lake.

nina: Yes.

trigorin: I love fishing. For me there's no greater pleasure than sitting on the bank at sunset and watching the cork bob up and down.

nina: But I should think that if someone had pleasure in creating a work of art, he couldn't take pleasure in anything else.

arkadina (laughing). Don't talk that way. Whenever anyone compliments him, he makes himself scarce.

At which point, Shamrayev launches into his anecdote about the basso Silva, a pause ensues, and Dorn makes his famous remark, 'A silent angel flew by'.

The apparently banal passage is in fact a turning-point for Nina and Trigorin. Their introduction reveals in a few deft strokes the incompatibility of their views of art: Trigorin can proffer only a few platitudes about the play, before turning to a more engaging subject, fishing. (These are, incidentally, two of his mere three speeches in this act, a sign of his displacement in the wild Treplyovian surround­ings.) Nina can only express her second-hand notions of artistic creativity. Arkadina plays stage manager, seating Nina, answering for Trigorin and patronizing them both.