The pure-souled, lone, provincial actress, a prey to the jealousy of colleagues, the importunities of admirers, and the scorn of society, was an early avatar of the Poor Liza type. In Pisemsky's One Thousand Souls (1858) Nastenka, a local girl betrayed, returns to her home town as a famous tragedienne to enjoy a bittersweet reunion with her former lover. This interview parallels the similar scene between Treplyov and Nina. When Nastenka relates her past sufferings and berates her love for not going on with his writing, he flies into a rage and looks to her to save him from himself, which she does. Significantly, Nina does not marry her former suitor out of a sense of duty and fond memories; she sees her duty is to her career, and her memories of 'a bright, warm, joyous, pure life . . . feelings like tender, fragile flowers' are inaccurate. At Nina's most intense moment of recollection, she runs away, leaving the failed writer to save himself, if he can.
Other literary prototypes for Nina include Anninka and Lyubinka in Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel The Golovlyov Family (1876), who flee the stifling family estate and after a brief stint in Moscow, descend to touring seedy provincial theatres in musical comedy: seduction, arrest, alcoholism and attempted suicide follow in quick succession. Negina, in Ostrovsky's comedy Talents and Admirers (1881), on the other hand, a gifted provincial leading lady, turns down the love of the idealistic student Melusov to go to Moscow with a wealthy landowner in order to further her career.
melusov: Oh, Sasha, how can you! Are talent and depravity inseparable?
negina: No, no! Not depravity! Ah, what a man you are . . . understand . . . I'm an actress! But according to you I ought to be some sort of heroine. Yet how can every woman be a heroine? I'm an actress . . . And if I were to marry you I'd soon throw you over and go back to the stage. Even for the smallest salary. Just to be there - on the stage. I can't live without the theatre.5
Nina's beginnings, her debut outside Moscow at a summer theatre, her subsequent touring, her dead baby and empty affair, recall the swift decline of Anninka and Lyubinka, as do her third-class railway trips to boom towns like Yelets where 'businessmen with a taste for the arts will pester me with their attentions. A sordid life'. But, like Negina, her faith in her vocation keeps her from succumbing to despair. We even hear Negina's assertion in Nina's 'I'm a gull . . . Not so, I'm an actress. Why, yes!'
Chekhov's early stories abound with actresses who lead erratic lives and endure slurs and contempt for it; but Nina continues to dismiss the shoddiness 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 anything in
Treplyov's play 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 realised, 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 not 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, for, as the Soviet critic Chudakov has said, they 'themselves call their basic theses into question'.6 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 belletrist, but by the play's end, he is longing to find similar formulas by which to avoid journalese. Arkadina may not have read her son's work ('No time') 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. A more productive antithesis than that of Treplyov-Trigorin, who both contain elements of Chekhov himself, might be a polarity of idealism and art, with Treplyov at one end, and the schoolmaster Medvedenko, all purblind financial worries, at the other. The two men are linked by Masha, who loves the young writer ('He has. . . the look of a poet') and is loved by the teacher. Each act opens with her statement of the hopelessness of her situation, moving from the affected pose of 'I am in mourning for my life' to the flat acceptance of 'unrequited love - that's only for novels'. She and Nina are to be contrasted in the uneasy terms with which they deal with their frustrated hopes.
The literary critic Prince Mirsky pointed out that bezdar- nost ('giftlessness' or 'lack of talent') was a 'characteristically Chekhovian word'7; for it sums up an absence of positive qualities. Chekhov once defined talent as the ability 'to distinguish important evidence from unimportant' (to Suvorin, 30 May 1888). In The Seagull, the word 'talent' is the touchstone by which the characters evaluate themselves and one another. Treplyov begins by feeling he is a nobody among the actors and writers that crowd his mother's salon: he claims to have 'no talent at all'. But he rebukes Nina for considering him 'a mediocrity, a nonentity' and points scornfully at Trigorin as a 'genuine talent'. In her anger, Arkadina lashes out at her son by referring to 'people with no talent and lots of pretensions', and when he retaliates 'I've got more talent than the lot of you put together,' she crushes him by uttering his own thought: 'You nobody'. In Act One, Arkadina encourages Nina to go on the stage by saying 'You must have talent'; in the last act, Treplyov grudgingly states '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, 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 had declared 'there aren't many brilliant talents around these days . . . but the average actor has improved greatly'. Sharing Chekhov's distrust of the grand gesture, Dorn prefers the amelioration of the general lot to artistic supermen. Nina, who had idealised Arkadina and Trigorin as 'a celebrated actress' and 'a famous author' to whom commoners must defer, finally recognises that fame and glamour are less important than staying power.
Treplyov's one 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. But Chekhov is careful to place the harsh criticism on the lips of Arkadina, whose taste and motives are suspect, and Nina, who complains that it is nothing but chitka, literally a 'reading,' a technical term she may have picked up from Arkadina. Chekhov is not ridiculing Treplyov for his espousal of new forms, something he himself had predicted might take a hundred years to evolve. Treplyov's shortcoming is his inability to preserve the purity of his ideal; his symbolist venture is actually a garble of popular stage techniques ill-connected to his poetic aspirations. The devil's red eyes are, as Arkadina observes, 'special effects'. His theatre, 'Curtain, first grooves, second grooves, and beyond that, empty space' is an amateur mock-up of Lentovsky's Fantasy Theatre in Moscow, relying on the gloom and the damp for atmosphere. He seems unable to find an original way of expressing his nebulous ideas; his play, like Bj0rnson's Beyond Human Power, 'has no significance because the idea isn't clear. It's impossible to make one's characters perform miracles, when you yourself have no sharply defined conviction as to miracles' (to Suvorin, 20 June 1896). In his notebooks, Chekhov stressed, 'Treplyov has no fixed goals and that's what destroyed him. Talent destroyed him'.