The opening night, December 17, 1898, despite off-stage jitters, was a palpable hit, insuring the theater’s success, and the seagull became the Moscow Art Theatre’s trademark. Chekhov was less than ecstatic. He thought that Stanislavsky misinterpreted Trigorin by making him too elegant and formal; he detested Mariya Roksanova’s ladylike Nina. Whatever his misgivings, the educated, middle-class audiences took to the play precisely because, for the first time, “the way we live now” was subjected to the same careful counterfeit presentment that had hitherto been applied only to the exotic past. The spectators beheld their own tics and heard their own speech patterns meticulously copied.
Taking advantage of the outdoor settings of the early acts and the dimly lit interior at the end, Stanislavsky laid on climatic and atmospheric effects to create an overpowering mood (nastroenie). The method, relying on sound effects, diffused lighting, and a snail’s pace, worked so well for The Seagull that it became standard operating procedure at the Art Theatre for Chekhov’s later plays and, indeed, those of almost any author. In the last analysis, it was the pervasive mood that made The Seagull a hit. The young actor Meyerhold, who played Treplyov, later credited Stanislavsky with being the first to link the sound of rain on the window and morning light peeping through the shutters with the characters’ behavior. “At that time this was a discovery.”1 The dramatist Leonid Andreev was to call it “panpsychism,” the animation of everything in a Chekhov play from distant music to the chirp of a cricket to munching an apple, each contributing equally to the play’s total effect.2
Chekhov’s objections to the Moscow interpretation did not, however, spring from its style, but from the imbalance in meaning that Stanislavsky had induced. Although it contains what Chekhov called “a ton of love,” The Seagull is not a soap opera about triangular relationships or a romantic dramatization of Trigorin’s “subject for a short story.” It is perhaps Chekhov’s most personal play in its treatment of the artist’s métier. The theme of splendors and miseries of artists is plainly struck by Medvedenko at the start, when he enviously refers to Nina and Treplyov sharing in a creative endeavor. Nina picks it up when she explains why her parents won’t let her come to Sorin’s estate: “They say this place is Bohemia.” Years of theater-going, reviewing, dealing with performers and managers were distilled by Chekhov into a density of metaphor for the artistic experience, for the contrasts between commercialism and idealism, facility and aspiration, purposeless talent and diligent mediocrity. Of the central characters, one is a would-be playwright, another a successful author; one is an acclaimed if second-rate star of the footlights, another an aspiring actress.
Stanislavsky’s black-and-white vision of the play also ran counter to Chekhov’s attempt to create multiple heroes and multiple conflicts. Treplyov seems the protagonist because the play begins with his artistic credo and his moment of revolt, and it ends with his self-destruction. In terms of stage time, however, he shares the limelight with many other claimants, whose ambitions cancel out one another.
Nina, likewise, cannot be singled out as the one survivor who preserves her ideals in spite of all. The type of the victimized young girl, abandoned by her love and coming to a bad end, recurred in Russian literature from N. M. Karam-zin’s Poor Liza (1792) onward. Often, she was depicted as the ward of an old woman who, in her cruelty or wilful egoism, promotes the girl’s downfall. Many plays of Ostrovsky and Aleksey Potekhin feature such a pair, and the relationship is subtly handled by Turgenev in A Month in the Country (1850). In The Seagull, the relationship is rarefied: it is Arkadina’s example, rather than her intention, that sends Nina to Moscow, maternity, and mumming.
Chekhov’s early stories abound with actresses who lead erratic lives and endure slurs and contempt for it; but Nina continues to dismiss the shoddi-ness of the work she is given, determined to develop an inner strength, regardless of old forms or new. Should she be extolled as a shining talent to be contrasted with Arkadina’s routinier activity? Nina’s ideas on art and fame are jejune and couched in the bromides of cheap fiction; her inability to see Tre-plyov’s play as other than words and speeches, her offer to eat black bread and live in a garret for the reward of celebrity, are obtuse and juvenile. Hers are not dreams that deserve to be realized, and there is nothing tragic in her having to reconcile them with the ordinary demands of life.
Similarly, Chekhov does not mean us to accept at face value Treplyov’s harsh verdicts on his mother and her lover. They may truckle to popular demand, but they are crippled by self-doubt. Arkadina, barnstorming the countryside in the Russian equivalent of East Lynne, is convinced that she is performing a public service; her stage name ambivalently refers both to Arcadia and to a garish amusement park in St. Petersburg. Trigorin, well aware that he is falling short of his masters Tolstoy and Turgenev, still plugs away in the tradition of well-observed realism.
Treplyov and Trigorin cannot be set up as hostile antitheses; as Chudakov says, they “themselves call their basic theses into question.”3 Treplyov’s desire for new forms is a more vociferous and less knowing version of Trigorin’s self-deprecation. The younger writer scorns the elder as a hack, but by the play’s end, he is longing to find formulas for his own writing. Arkadina may not have read her son’s story and Trigorin may not have cut the pages on any story but his own; but Treplyov himself admits he has never read Trigorin’s stuff, thus partaking of their casual egoism. Since both Treplyov and Trigorin contain elements of Chekhov, a more productive antithesis might be that of idealism and materialism, with Treplyov the romantic at one end and the schoolmaster Medvedenko at the other. The two men are linked by Masha, who loves the one and barely puts up with the other. Each act opens with her statement of the hopelessness of her situation. Even here, though, the antithesis is not complete: Treplyov is as hamstrung by his poverty as Medvedenko, and the teacher cherishes his own wishes to make art with a beloved object.
The literary critic Prince Mirsky pointed out that bezdarnost (“lack of talent”) was a “characteristically Chekhovian word”4 in its absence of positive qualities. Chekhov described talent to Suvorin as the ability “to distinguish important evidence from unimportant” (May 30, 1888). In The Seagull, “talent” is the touchstone by which the characters evaluate themselves and one another. Treplyov fears “he has no talent at all,” but he rebukes Nina for considering him a “mediocrity, a nonentity” and points sarcastically to Trigorin as the “genuine talent.” In her anger, Arkadina lashes out at her son by referring to “people with no talent but plenty of pretensions,” to which he retaliates, “I’m more talented than the lot of you put together.” In Act One, Arkadina encourages Nina to go on stage by saying, “You must have talent,” and in the last act, Treplyov grudgingly acknowledges that “she showed some talent at screaming or dying.” Trigorin complains that his public regards him as no more than “charming and talented,” yet when Arkadina caresses him with “You’re so talented,” he succumbs to her blandishments.
The point is that “talent” exists independently of human relations and can be consummated in isolation. To be talented is not necessarily to be a superior person. As usual, Dr. Dorn sees most acutely to the heart of the matter: “You’re a talented fellow,” he tells Treplyov, “but without a well-defined goal . . . your talent will destroy you.” Tactlessly, in Arkadina’s presence, he declares, “there aren’t many brilliant talents around these days . . . but the average actor has improved greatly”; sharing Chekhov’s distrust of the grand gesture, he prefers a betterment of the general lot to artistic supermen. Even Nina finally realizes that fame and glamour are less important than staying power.