25 Chitka, which is theatrical slang. Nina’s vocabulary has profited by listening to Arkadina.
26 A line from Nekrasov’s poem “A heavy cross fell to her lot” (1856), set to music by Adolf Prigozhy.
27 In full, “stand bewitched before thee,” a line from V. I. Krasov’s Stanzas (1842), set to music by Aleksandr Alyabiev.
28 Dorn uses the French word accoucheur, an indication of his refinement.
29 Capital of the guberniya of the same name, located in the Ukraine; its main industry was horse trading, slaughterhouses, and machinery manufacture. Its population was largely Little Russians (the standard tsarist term for Ukrainians) and Jews. Acting companies proliferated in such towns during the fairs.
30 In the original, “as Raspluev.” “Ivan Antonovich, a small but thickset man around fifty,” a great comic role in Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin’s Krechinsky’s Wedding (first staged 1855), the cynical henchman of the confidence-man hero.
31 Stage name of Prov Mikhailovich Yermilov (1818–1872), a famous character actor and member of the Maly Theatre troupe in Moscow from 1839 to his death. He was responsible for the growing popularity of Ostrovsky’s plays. Sukhovo-Kobylin believed that Sadovsky had vulgarized the part of Raspluev, which he created.
32 In the original, de gustibus aut bene aut nihil, a violent yoking together of three different Latin sayings: De gustibus non disputantur, “there’s no point arguing over taste”; De mortuis nil nisi bene, “Say naught but good of the dead”; and Aut Caesar aut nihil, “Either Caesar or nothing.”
33 A quotation from Hamlet, the closet scene, Act III, scene 3. In Nikolay Polevoy’s Russian translation, Arkadina’s quotation is reasonably accurate, but Treplyov’s is a loose paraphrase of “making love over the nasty sty.” The original image would have been too coarse for nineteenth-century playgoers and censors.
34 Literally, chto-to dekadentskoe, something decadent. At this time, symbolist and decadent writing, popularized by Maeterlinck, was considered the cutting edge of literary innovation in Europe, and was beginning to gain disciples in Russia.
35 A saying that continues “has stopped being Jove” or “is in the wrong.”
36 The Moscow Art Theatre used Glinka’s Temptation.
37 Chekhov’s two favorite pastimes in the country were fishing with a float—a cork attached to a weighted line that moves when a fish bites—and gathering mushrooms.
38 Although Éloi Silva, a Belgian tenor born in 1846, was a star at the Petersburg Italian opera, mainly in Meyerbeer, Chekhov has simply lifted the name and applied it to a bass.
39 A common saying, used whenever a pause suddenly falls over a conversation. Chekhov uses it in his stories frequently.
40 In an early draft of the play, Masha’s father was revealed to be Dr. Dorn at this point. When the play was revived at the Moscow Art Theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko advised Chekhov to eliminate this plot element:
I said either this theme has to be developed or else entirely removed. Especially since it ends the first act. The end of a first act by its very nature has to wind up tightly the situation to be developed in the second act.
Chekhov said, “The audience does like it when at the end of an act a loaded gun is aimed at it.”
“True enough,” I replied, “but then it has to go off, and not simply be chucked away during the intermission.”
It turns out that later on Chekhov repeated this remark more than a few times.
He agreed with me. The ending was revised.
(Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Out of the Past [1938])
41 In Chekhov’s story “Ariadne” (1895) there is a similar passage:
“I just wonder, sir, how you can live without love?” he said. “You are young, handsome, interesting,—in short, you are a fashion plate of a man, but you live like a monk. Ah, these old men of twenty-eight! I am almost ten years older than you, but which of us is the younger? Ariadne Grigoryevna, who is younger?”
“You, of course,” replied Ariadne.
42 Siébel’s song in Act III, scene one, of Gounod’s opera Faust. In Russia, quoting it meant “You’re talking through your hat.”
43 French, “properly, suitably.”
44 From Sur l’eau (1888), Maupassant’s diary of a Mediterranean cruise, taken to restore his shattered nerves. The passage continues:
Just like water, which, drop by drop, pierces the hardest rock, praise falls, word by word, on the sensitive heart of a man of letters. So, as soon as she sees he is tenderized, moved, won over by this constant flattery, she isolates him, she gradually cuts the connections he might have elsewhere, and insensibly accustoms him to come to her house, to enjoy himself there, to put his mind at ease there. To get him nicely acclimated to her house, she looks after him and prepares his success, puts him in the limelight, as a star, shows him, ahead of all the former habitués of the place, a marked consideration, an unequaled admiration.
45 Literally, “put the evil eye on her,” presumably by arousing envy.
46 Valerian, a mild sedative, the equivalent of aspirin (which was not widely marketed until 1899). The nervous actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, on the opening night of The Seagull, had dosed themselves heavily with valerian.
47 “I was rehearsing Trigorin in The Seagull. And Anton Pavlovich invited me himself to talk over the role. I arrived with trepidation.
“‘You know,’ Anton Pavlovich began, ‘the fishing poles ought to be, you know, homemade, bent. He makes them himself with a penknife . . . The cigar is a good one . . . Maybe it’s not a really good one, but it definitely has to have silver paper . . .’
“Then he fell silent, thought a bit and said:
“‘But the main thing is the fishing-poles . . .’” (Vasily Kachalov, Shipovnik Almanac 23 [1914]).
Chekhov shared Trigorin’s love of fishing and wrote in a letter, “To catch a perch! It’s finer and sweeter than love!”
48 Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words. (Hamlet, Act II, scene 2)
Treplyov’s mention of the sun may reflect his unconscious recollection of Hamlet’s earlier lines about Ophelia, that she not stand too much “i’ the sun.”
49 Compare Chekhov’s letter to M. V. Kiselyova, September 21, 1886: “. . . It’s no great treat to be a great writer. First, the life is gloomy . . . Work from morn to night, and not much profit . . . The money would make a cat weep . . .”
50 An English comic phrase, from the works of the humorist Jerome K. Jerome, who was very popular in Russia.
51 Heliotropium peruvianum, a small blue or dark-blue flower, with a faint aroma of vanilla.
52 Rather than the verb pisat, to write, Chekhov uses popisyvat, which, as George Calderon put it, “suggests that his writing is a sort of game, something that serves to keep him out of mischief. The critic Mikhailovsky used it, in the early days, of Chekhov’s compositions.”
53 Poprishchin, the hero of Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” a minor bureaucrat whose frantic scribbling reveals his delusions of adequacy. He falls in love with the daughter of his bureau chief and ends up in a madhouse.
54 This reflects Chekhov’s own feelings after the opening of the revised Ivanov in 1889.
55 Tolstoy considered this speech the only good thing in the play. Chekhov himself considered obsessional writing to be the sign of a true writer.
56 The most famous novel (1862) of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883), concerning a generational conflict, and offering a pattern of the “New Man.” Chekhov gave the conflict between the generations a new twist in The Seagull.