Love is Unrequited... Wider Reading 14: The Seagull

By now, you will have ascertained my love of Russia and Russian literature. I am trying to wean myself off it by taking a few doses of Les Miserables, so look out for that sometime soon. In the meantime however, let us see how far we can push Mr Chekhov and his play-within-a-play. "The Seagull" is the first of his quartet of major theatrical works written between 1895 and 1902. It's disastrous opening night caused the writer to renounce the theatre, only to return in 1898 with "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", and his most famous work, "The Cherry Orchard". "The Seagull" dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev. The character of Trigorin is often considered to be Chekhov's greatest male role, though as with the rest of Chekhov's full-length plays, this one relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In contrast to the melodrama of the mainstream theatre of the 19th century, lurid actions (such as Konstantin's suicide attempts) are not shown onstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly; in other words, their lines are full of subtext, and many important things are not said aloud.

Part of Chekhov's genius is that he does not simply write about artists and love, he creates the embodiment of art and love on stage, and entwines the two. Through his characters' particular personalities, Chekhov portrays the various manners of being an artist and particularly, an artist in love. All four protagonists find themselves this way. Arkadina, Trigorin, Treplev, and Nina have divergent relationships with their craft and their lovers. Arkadina and Nina romanticize acting, placing it on a pedestal higher than the everyday affairs of life. Arkadina places herself on this same pedestal using her identity as an actress to excuse her vanity. Nina exalts acting as well, but, contrary to Arkadina, she endows acting with nobility, sacrifice, and privilege. In writing, Treplev compulsively paralyzes himself in the pursuit of perfection, while Trigorin obsessively gathers details from his life and the lives around him for his work without allowing the work to affect his life.

The playwright's setting of a stage upon a stage lets us know from the outset that "The Seagull" is no ordinary play. Treplev creates a situation in which the play characters become increasingly similar to their own audience, because they themselves watch and are aware of the illusion of the theater. This is a tradition in the theater, presented repeatedly in Shakespeare's plays, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is emblematic of the exploration of the self that the play will examine, and foreshadows major themes of the play such as the role of theater, art, and love in a person's life as well as self-evaluation and reinvention of one's purpose in life. There are specific allusions to Hamlet: in the first act a son stages a play to impress his mother, a professional actress, and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother shows for her son's play.

The Seagull - Quotations