Anton Chekhov

This final locale has a Maeterlinckian tinge, for there is a glass door, used only to admit Nina, who enters romanti­cally enswathed in a talma, an enveloping cloak, named after Napoleon's favourite actor. After days spent wander­ing around the lake, she employs an aperture no other character does, to come in from 'the garden' where 'it's dark . . . that stage . . . stands bare and unsightly, like a skeleton, and the scene curtain flaps in the wind'. Maeter­linck's dramas are full of mysterious windows and doors that act as entries into another world, beyond which invisible forces are to be intuited and uncanny figures glimpsed. Quoting Turgenev, Nina identifies herself as a homeless wanderer, seeking a haven.⁸ But what is 'warm

and cosy' to her is claustrophobic and stifling to Treplyov.

In fact, the whole estate acts as a cynosure for the characters' frustrations. Although it has been in Sorin's family for at least two generations - Arkadina recalls playing lotto there as a child, - it is no Turgenevian nest of gentry. None of the characters actually belongs there or feels at home: Arkadina would rather be in an hotel room learning lines; she loses her temper when her wish to go to town is thwarted. Sorin would like to be in an office, hearing street traffic and feels 'as stale as an old cigarette holder'; he sees his nephew going the same way and tries to pry loose some money for a trip abroad. Nina's are always flying visits, time snatched from her oppressed life else­where. Medvedenko is there on sufferance. Shamrayev the overseer is a retired military man with no skill as an agricultural manager. Only Trigorin is loath to depart, because, for him, the estate provides enforced idleness. The lake's enchantment can be felt as the spell of Sleeping Beauty's castle: everyone who sets foot there is suspended in time, frozen in place. Real life seems to go on somewhere else.

This symbolic use of environment is better integrated than the more obvious symbol of the seagull. In Ibsen's The Wild Duck, the title is of essential importance; all the leading characters are defined by their attitude to the bird, and it exists, unseen, only as they recreate it in their imaginations. The seagull, however, signifies only to three characters: Treplyov who defines it as a symbol, Trigorin who reshapes its symbolic meaning, and Nina who adopts and eventually rejects the symbolism. For Treplyov, it is a means of turning life into art: feeling despised and rejected he shoots the bird as a surrogate martyr, and when the surrogate is in turn rejected, tries to shoot himself. Nina, in Act One, had felt 'lured to the lake like a gull,' but repudiates Treplyov's use of bird imagery for his self- identification. However, when her idol Trigorin spins his yarn about a girl who lives beside a lake, happy and free as a gull, she avidly adopts the persona, even though his notion of her freedom is wholly inaccurate. The story turns out to be false, for the man who ruined the bird is not the one who ruins the girl. Nor is Nina ruined in any real sense. She starts to sign her letters to Treplyov 'The Seagull,' which he associates with the mad miller in Pushkin's dramatic poem, 'The Rusalka'. The miller's daughter had been 'ruined' by a prince and drowned herself, leaving her father to run mad and think himself a crow. Both Treplyov and Trigorin thus endeavour to recast Nina as a character in fiction. But when, in the last act, she rejects the sobriquet - 'I'm a seagull. No, not so,' - she is spurning both Treplyov's martyr-bird and Trigorin's novelettish heroine. She sur­vives, if only in an anti-romantic, workaday world.

The varying interpretations to which the seagull is subjected indicate the solipsism in which each character's dream clashes with the others'. A significant speech in the last act has been overlooked because, typically, it seems to be an irrelevance. Dr. Dorn is asked which city he most enjoyed in Europe and he replies 'Genoa,' on account of

The marvellous crowds in the street there. When even­ing comes and you leave your hotel, the whole street is teeming with people. Then you drift aimlessly into the crowd zigzagging this way and that, you live with its rhythm, you merge with it psychically and you begin to believe that in fact there may be a universal soul, much like the one that Nina Zarechnaya acted in your play once.

Dorn's description presages W. B. Yeats' 1932 poem

 

2. Meyerhold's production of The Proposal in 33 Swoons, Moscow, 1935. Igor llyinsky as Lomov and Logina as Natasha.

 

Michael Chekhov, the dramatist's nephew, in A Tragedian in Spite of Himself, Majestic Theatre, New York, 1935.

Simov's setting for acts One and Two of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre, 1898.