As the artistic demands Chekhov made upon his own writing increased, he became more and more intolerant of current literature. Suvorin's weakness for popular contemporary novelists, especially foreign ones, particularly annoyed him. To his debunking of Suvorin's favorite Paul Bourget, he now added Sienkiewicz. His Polaniecki Family, he wrote Suvorin, was a devilish heap of scenes of family happiness in which the hero's wife is so extremely faithful to her husband, and by intuition understands God and life so thoroughly that the result is sickeningly cloying and clumsy — just as though one had received a wet, slobbery kiss. "The novel's aim is to lull the bourgeoisie by its golden dreams. Be faithful to your wife, pray beside her at the altar, make money, love sport — and your affairs are all set, both in this and in the next world. The bourgeoisie admire the so-called 'positive' types and novels with happy endings which calm their thoughts so that they can accumulate capital, maintain their innocence, behave like beasts, and be happy all at the same time." (January 13,1895.)
\Vbat he particularly found lacking in popular bourgeois literature was a talent for humanity, that infinite compassion that made it possible to understand without condemning man's weaknesses, his diseases of body and soul. For Chekhov this often meant the difference between talent and art, as he told his disciple Elena Shavrova. He criticized her for allowing the women in one of her tales to regard syphilis as something unspeakable. "Syphilis is not a vice, not the result of wicked excesses, but an illness, and those afflicted with it require sympathetic and understanding treatment. It is not a good trait if your wife deserts her sick husband bccausc he has an infection or loathsome disease. She, of course, may take what attitude she likes toward it, but the author must be humane to the tips of his fingers." (February 28, 1895.)
Though the poctic instinct in Chekhov was strong and he had positive likes and dislikes in verse, he reached a point at about this time when he refused to offer analytical judgments on the manuscripts that poets sent him. "Verse is not in my line," he informed A. V. Zhirke- vich,13 "I've never written it, my mind refuses to memorize it, and I react to it the way a peasant docs, but I cannot say definitely why I'm pleased or bored by it. Formerly I tried to keep in touch with poets and to set my views before them, but nothing came of it and I soon gave the matter up, perhaps like a man who feels well but expresses his thoughts uninterestingly and indefinitely. Now I usually confine myself to writing 'I like this' or 'I don't like this.' Your poem I like." (March 10,1895.)
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Five years had passed since the failure of Chekhov's last full-length play, The Wood Demon, and though his disillusionment then had been painful, he oncc again began to turn his thoughts to the theater. In 1894 and over much of 1895 the notion of writing another play both repelled and attracted him, for the urge to experiment in dramatic writing, which had been reflected in The Wood Demon, still pursued him. In April, Suvorin suggested that he write for the theater which he had acquired in Petersburg. Chekhov answered that he might write a play in the autumn and that it would be a comedy. If he did do a play for Suvorin, he said, it would be something strange — that is, not the conventional type of play — another indication of his long dissatisfaction
13 He wrote poetry under the pseudonym of A. Nivin.
with the stereotyped fare contemporary Russian dramatists were serving up.
Apart from Suvorin in Petersburg, two pillars of the Moscow theater at this time, Nemirovich-Danchenko and A. I. Sumbatov-Yuzhin, pressed Chekhov to return to playwriting. Finally, on October 21, 1895, Chekhov informed Suvorin: ". . . Just imagine, I'm ,writing a play which I'll finish probably not earlier than the end of November. I'm writing it with pleasure, though I sin terribly against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, a landscape (view of a lake), much talk about literature, little action, and tons of love." A few weeks later he had given it a title: The Sea Gull. And in less than a month after he announced beginning it, he wrote Elena Shavrova that he had finished a draft of the play. "It is nothing special. In general, I'd say that I'm an indifferent dramatist." (November 18, 1895.) In fact, no sooner had he completed this first draft of The Sea Gull than his old fears about his ability as a playwright began to reassert themselves, for he wrote Suvorin: "I began it forte and finished
pianissimo — against all the rules of dramatic art. A story has emerged. I'm more dissatisfied than pleased with it, and, having read through my newborn play, I again became convinced that I'm not at all a dramatist. The acts are very short; there are four of them. Although it is still only a skeleton of a play, a project which will be changed a million times before next season, I've ordered two copies to be typed on a Remington (the machine types up two copies at a time), and I'll send you one. Only don't let anyone read it." (November 21,1895.)
As a number of observations in his notebooks indicate, Chekhov had been dwelling upon the theme of The Sea Gull weeks before he began to write it. And it is clear from some of these notes that the new direction he had given his art in the best of his tales over the last few years would also guide the writing of his play. He had learned that the objective presentation of life was not enough. Artistic objectivity was important, but the writer must also have a purpose and an aim and be prepared to pass moral judgment on the endless disharmony between life as it is and life as it should be. Further, he must be able to apprehend man's personal vision of life, his idealizing flights into the realm of the irrational. The poetic power of Chekhov to evoke man's vision of life, to reveal him as he truly is and not as he merely appears in real life, and to convey all this by creating an emotional mood with which the audience identifies itself — this was the new direction that he endeavored to impart to The Sea Gull.
With little difficulty one can trace various shreds and patches of action, incidents, settings, characters, and lines of The Sea Gull to Chekhov's stories, life at Melikhovo, his friends, and his letters. However, an event that must have helped considerably to bring the ramified theme of the play into focus in his mind, and might even have provided its initial inspiration, was the unhappy romance of Potapenko and Lika, which is reflected in the affair between the writer Trigorin and the struggling actress Nina whose child by him dies.14 According to Masha, when The Sea Gull was read to a group of family and friends at Melikhovo, she and the others present at once recognized these similarities. They even detected a resemblance between Arkadina in the play and Potapenko's wife.
Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik, in her memoirs, recalls that Chekhov read The Sea Gull to a still larger group, this time of writers and theatrical people, at Yavorskaya's apartment in Moscow, and she also noticed the similarity between the Trigorin-Nina and Potapenko-Lika romances.15 She observed the confused impression which the innovations in the play left on people of the theater who, like Korsh and Yavorskaya, were used to the garish dramas of Dumas and Sardou; these playwrights would hesitate to allow a character to shoot himself behind the scenes and certainly would not permit it without giving him an opportunity to make a speech before his death. Chekhov heard these comments in stern silence.