Treplyov’s display of talent, his symbolist play located in a void where all things are extinct and the only conflicts are between the Universal Will and the Principle of Eternal Matter, may seem like parody. Chekhov, however, is careful to place the harsh criticism on the lips of Arkadina, whose taste and motives are suspect, and Nina, who is parroting actor’s jargon she has heard from her. Chekhov is not ridiculing Treplyov for his espousal of a new form but for his inability to preserve the purity of his ideaclass="underline" his symbolist venture is a garble of popular stage techniques incongruous with his poetic aspirations, “Curtain, downstage, upstage, and beyond that, empty space,” “special effects.” He seems unable to find an original play to express his nebulous ideas; his play, as Chekhov said to Suvorin of the Norwegian Bj0rnson’s Beyond Human Power, “has no meaning because the idea isn’t clear. It’s impossible to have one’s characters perform miracles, when you yourself have no sharply defined conviction as to miracles” (June 20, 1896). In his notebooks, Chekhov stipulated, “Treplyov has no fixed goals, and that’s what destroyed him. Talent destroyed him.”
Chekhov, for his part, did manage to initiate his own new form in The Seagull, inchoate and transitional though it may be. For the first time, he did away with “French scenes,” allowing each act to develop not through the entrances and exits of characters but by a concealed inner dynamic. The overall rhythm of the play is also carefully scored. As he told Suvorin, on November 21, 1895, “I wrote it forte and ended it pianissimo, contrary to all the rules of dramatic art.” The forte passages occur in the first three acts, which are compressed into a week’s time; then there is a lapse of two years before the pianissimo of Act Four. The characters must fill in this long gap in their own knowledge by the awkward device of asking one another what’s been going on. But this is the result of Chekhov’s eagerness to keep offstage what a traditional playwright would have saved for his obligatory scenes. The most intense and sensational actions—Nina’s seduction and abandonment, the death of her child, Trigorin’s return to Arkadina — are, like Treplyov’s two suicide attempts, left to our imagination. We are allowed to see the antecedents and the consequences, but not the act itself.
The two-year hiatus between the third and fourth acts stresses the recurrent theme of memory. The past is always idyllic: Arkadina’s reminiscence of life along the lakeshore, Poling’s evocation of her past fling with the Doctor, Shamraev’s evocation of antediluvian actors, Sorin’s rosy picture of an urban existence are the older generation’s forecast of the clashing recollections of Treplyov and Nina. With wry irony, Chekhov divulges each of his characters’ insensitivity or obliviousness. “It’s too late,” insists Dorn, when Polina tries to rekindle their earlier affair. “I don’t remember,” shrugs Arkadina, when her charitable behavior is recalled. “Don’t remember,” says Trigorin, when he is shown the gull he had stuffed in memory of his first conversation with Nina.
Another new form that Chekhov initiated in The Seagull is the emblematic progression of localities. The first act is set in “a portion of the park on Sorin’s estate,” where the path to the lake is blocked off by Treplyov’s trestle stage. This particular region is remote from the main house, and Treplyov has chosen it as his private turf: the characters who make up his audience must enter his world of shadows and dampness. They spend only a brief time there, before returning to the safe norms evoked by the strains of the piano drifting into the clearing. Treplyov wants his work of art to be seen as coexistent with nature, with what Dorn calls “the spellbinding lake.” Ironically, his manmade stage prevents people from walking to the lake, which his mother equates with “laughter, noise, gunshots, and one romance after another,” the ordinary recreations Treplyov disdains. The most casual response to the lake comes from Trigorin, who sees it simply as a place to fish.
Act Two moves to Arkadina’s territory, a house with a large veranda. The lake can now be seen in the bright sunlight, not the pallid moonshine. The surrounding verdure is a “croquet lawn,” as manicured and well-kempt as Arkadina herself who keeps “up to the mark . . . my hair done comme il faut.” Notably, Treplyov is the only member of the family circle who does not go into the house in this act. It stands for his mother’s hold on life, and from its depths comes the call that keeps Trigorin on the estate.
The dining room of Act Three brings us into the house, but it is a neutral space, used for solitary meals, wound-dressing, farewells. The act is organized as a series of tête-a-têtes that are all the more intense for taking place in a somewhere no one can call his own. The last act takes place in a drawing room that Treplyov has turned into a workroom. As the act opens, preparations are being made to convert it into a sickroom. The huddling together of the dying Sorin and the artistically moribund Treplyov implies that they are both “the man who wanted” but who never got what he wanted: a wife and a literary career. Once again, Treplyov has tried to set up a space of his own, only to have it overrun by a bustling form of life that expels him to the margins. To have a moment alone with Nina, he must bar the door to the dining room with a chair; the moment he removes the impediment, the intruders fill his space, turning it into a game-room. His private act of suicide must occur elsewhere.
This final locale has a Maeterlinckian tinge, for there is a glass door, through which Nina enters, romantically draped in a talma, an enveloping cloak named after Napoleon’s favorite tragedian. After days spent wandering around the lake, she emerges from an aperture no other character uses, 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 serve 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.” But what is “warm and cozy” to her is claustrophobic and stifling to Treplyov.
In fact, the whole estate is an enclosure for the characters’ frustration. This is no Turgenevian nest of gentry, for none of the characters feels at home here. Arkadina would rather be in a hotel room learning lines; Sorin would like to be in his office, hearing street noise. Seeing his nephew withering away on the estate, he tries to pry loose some money for a trip abroad. Nina’s are always flying visits, time snatched from her oppressed life elsewhere. Medve-denko is there on sufferance. Shamraev the overseer is a retired military man with no skills as a farm 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, as they re-create it in their private mythologies. The seagull, however, has significance for only three characters: Treplyov, who employs it as a symbol, Trigorin, who reinterprets its symbolic meaning, and Nina, who adopts and eventually repudiates the symbolism. For Treplyov, it is a means of turning art into life: feeling despised and rejected, he shoots the bird as a surrogate and, when the surrogate is in turn rejected, shoots himself. Nina had felt “lured to the lake like a gull” but will not accept Treplyov’s 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” (or “A Seagull”—Russian has no definite articles); he links this with the mad miller in Pushkin’s poem The Rusalka, who insanely thought himself a crow after his daughter, seduced and abandoned, drowned herself. Both Treplyov and Trigorin try to recast Nina as a fictional character, the conventional ruined girl who takes her own life. In the last act, however, she refuses this identity: “I’m a seagull. No, not that,” spurning both Treplyov’s martyr-bird and Trigorin’s novelletish heroine. She survives, if only in an anti-romantic, workaday world. Ultimately, Chekhov prefers the active responsibilities contingent on accepting one’s lot, even if this means a fate like Nina’s.