However, as Lika watched the developing action of The Sea Gull in the Alexandrinsky Theater that evening, she must have been more amazed by how the witchery of art had transformed her rather sordid affair with Potapenko than hurt by the resemblance of anything in the play to the reality of her own experience. For Nina is not really the heroine of Trigorin's projected short story — the young girl free and happy as a bird until a man comcs along, sees her, and from sheer idleness destroys her as Treplev had destroyed the sea gull. Rather, she is a poetic symbol of the indomitable quest of art that demands ultimate fulfillment in the facc of all the slings and arrows of misfortune. Charmingly naive when she first appears on the scene, and later rapturously in love with the writer Trigorin, Nina takes the bold decision to abandon her home in the country for Moscow to realize her consuming ambition to become a great actress. Trigorin betrays her, her baby dies, and she lives through a searing and vulgar theatrical experience in the provinces. However, when she returns two years later for a visit to the country, although she is still hopelessly in love with Trigorin, she is not a destroyed sea gull. "I'm now a real actress," she declares to Treplev in her moving monologue at the end of the play. "I act with delight, with rapture; I'm intoxicated when I'm on the stage and feel that I'm beautiful. And now, ever since I've been here, I walk about, I keep walking and thinking, thinking and feeling that my spiritual forces grow stronger every day. I now know, I understand, Kostya, that in our work, whether it is acting or writing, what matters is not fame, not glory, which I used to dream about, but the power to endure. Know how to bear your cross and to have faith. I have faith, and I no longer suffer so much, and when I think of my calling, I'm not afraid of life."
Here — Lika must have realized — was not the recalled bitterness of grief and shame, but fervent encouragement to accept one's suffering and have faith in work and life. Nor could Lika have disccmcd any marked similarity between Potapenko and Trigorin. Whatever image Trigorin may have had in the lost first draft of The Sea Gull, his resemblances to Potapenko in the revised version arc superficial, such as his writing at a breakneck speed and his attitude toward women. In' fact, the two writers in the play, Treplev and Trigorin, arc occasionally the mouthpieces of Chekhov's own ideas, although he would have condemned the personalities and the artistic achievements of both. Treplev's attack on the conventional drama and stage and his demand for new art forms echo Chekhov's own position. And there is much in Trigorin's early experiences as an author that parallel those of Chekhov, even to Trigorin's confession to Arkadina that as a youth, always around some editorial office, fighting off starvation, he had missed the kind of love that's young and beautiful and is all poetry. Chekhov had once made a somewhat similar confession to Lika. Despite Trigorin's successes as a writer, art for him had become a matter of routine. Like the old professor of science in A Dreary Story, he has no ruling principle in his art which would enable him to transcend the obvious. And Treplev's trouble, in Chekhov's eyes, is that at the end, unlike Nina, he lacks faith in himself and in his art. Neither of these authors could rise to the prescriptions of Dorn in the play, which reflect Chekhov's own view — that there is no beauty without seriousness; that every writer must have a definite object in his work; and that in every work of art there must be a clear, definite idea.
If Lika could not clearly see herself in Nina, nor Potapenko in Trigorin, neither did the play effect a catharsis in her. Several weeks after the performance she wrote Chekhov: "Yes, everyone here says that The Sea Gull is also borrowed from my life, moreover, that you gave a good dressing-down to a certain person!"
That opening night another woman watched the performance of The Sea Gull just as eagerly as Lika — Lidiya Avilova. She tells in her memoirs (Chapter X) how she went alone to the theater — Leikin, in his diary, mentions that he saw her there with her sister. Her detailed account of the failure of the play is well written and in general accords with other authentic records. Of course, she followed the action breathlessly, intent upon discovering Chekhov's mysterious answer, promised at the masked ball almost nine months before, as to whether he had recognized her on that occasion. As the action wore on she began to think he had been joking or had mistaken her for someone else at the ball. Then, in the third act, Nina presents Trigorin with a medallion on which she had had his initials engraved, the title of one of his books, and the reference: "Page 121, lines 11 and 12," which, when Trigorin checked, read: "If you ever need my life, come and take it" — the sentence from Chekhov's own story and the one to which Avilova had referred on the engraved watch-chain pendant she had sent him. Avilova writes in her memoirs: "My head was in a whirl, my heart pounded madly. . . . The numbers were different, not those which I had had engraved on the watch-chain pendant. Undoubtedly this was his answer. He had really answered me from the stage, and me, only me, not Yavorskaya or anyone else."
At home, when her husband had gone to bed, she checked the reference from the stage in Chekhov's volume of stories, but the lines told her nothing: ". . . est phenomena. But why do you look at me with such rapture? Do you like me?" In bed, she could not sleep. Suddenly the thought flashed through her mind that the lines were chosen from her own book which she had sent to Chekhov. She jumped out of bed and ran to the study to check. Lines 11 and 12 on page 121 read: "It is not proper for young ladies to go to masked balls."
Lidiya Avilova could take cold comfort from the fact that she had contributed something to The Sea Gull. Chekhov had made very effective use in the play of her gift of the inscribed pendant. However, she professed to see something deep and personal in the way he employed the device. "This is his answer!" she exclaims ecstatically in her memoirs. "An answer to many things: to who had sent the pendant and the woman in the mask. He had guessed everything, he knew all." Did she think that he conveyed a moral to her in the fate of Nina, the aspiring artist, who made known her love to a celebrated author through the device of an inscribed medallion, and had then been betrayed? It is impossible to say, especially since Nina was a young, unmarried girl, and Avilova, the mother of three children, was living equably enough with her husband. But the plain truth of the matter would appear to be that Chekhov had played on her one of the practical jokes of which he was so fond. And in this instance, as so often in Lika's case, it was his way of transforming into a comic interlude the serious pretensions of a woman whom he wished to discourage. In the course of revising The Sea Gull, after the episode at the masked ball, he had searched through Avilova's volume of short stories, found a sentence that would serve his purpose, and placed the appropriate reference on Nina's medallion. But a sense of humor was not one of Avilova's strong points.