Chekhov, however, did manage in The Seagull to initiate his own new form, incomplete and transitional though it may be. For the first time, he did away with Trench scenes,' allowing each act to develop not through the artificial entrances and exits of characters, but by a concealed inner dynamic. The overall rhythm of the play is also carefully scored. 'I wrote it forte and ended it pianissimo, contrary to all the rules of dramatic art' (to Suvorin, 21 Nov. 1895). The forte passages occur in the first three acts, which are compressed to within a week's time; there is then the lapse of two years before the pianissimo of Act Four. The characters must fill in the gaps in their and our knowledge by the awkward device of asking one another what's been going on. But this apparently clumsy structure derives from Chekhov's anxiety 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 consequences, as it were the foreplay and post-coital subsidence, but not the act itself.
The submergence of hyper-dramatic moments, the key to Chekhov's dramatic method, can be noticed halfway through Act One, after Treplyov has rung down the curtain on his play and stormed off. Eventually, Nina emerges from behind the stage, and Arkadina introduces her to Trigorin.
nina: Oh, I'm so pleased . . . (Embarrassed.) I read all your things.
arkadina (seating Nina beside her). Don't be bashful,
darling. He's a celebrity, but he doesn't put on airs. You see, he's bashful himself.
dorn: I presume we can raise the curtain now, it's spooky like this.
shamrayev (loudly). Yakov, haul up that curtain, boy!
(The curtain is raised.)
nina (to Trigorin). It's a strange play, isn't it?
trigorin: I didn't understand a word. Nevertheless, I did enjoy watching it. Your acting was so sincere. And the scenery was gorgeous. (Pause.) I suppose there are lots of fish in that lake.
nina: Yes.
trigorin: I love fishing. For me there's no greater pleasure than sitting on the bank at sunset and watching the cork bob up and down.
nina: But I should think that if someone had pleasure in creating a work of art, he couldn't take pleasure in anything else.
arkadina (laughing). Don't talk that way. Whenever anyone compliments him, he makes himself scarce.
At which point, Shamrayev launches into his anecdote about the basso Silva, a pause ensues, and Dorn makes his famous remark, 'A silent angel flew by'.
The apparently banal passage is in fact a turning-point for Nina and Trigorin. Their introduction reveals in a few deft strokes the incompatibility of their views of art: Trigorin can proffer only a few platitudes about the play, before turning to a more engaging subject, fishing. (These are, incidentally, two of his mere three speeches in this act, a sign of his displacement in the wild Treplyovian surroundings.) Nina can only express her second-hand notions of artistic creativity. Arkadina plays stage manager, seating Nina, answering for Trigorin and patronizing them both.
But the brilliant coup de theatre is to have the stage curtain taken up during the social ceremony; what might have been merely a naturalistic byblow becomes a symbolic revelation that Treplyov's effort is indeed spent, and the drama of Nina and Trigorin is about to begin. The pause that follows Shamrayev's story marks a first intermission, during which the liaison between the two is tacitly forged.
The two-year hiatus between the third and fourth acts stresses the recurrent theme of memory. The past is always idyllic: Arkadina's retrospection of life along the lakeshore, Polina's evocation of her past fling with the Doctor, Shamrayev's anecdotes 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 Dr. Dorn when Polina tries to rekindle their earlier affair. 'I don't remember,' shrugs Arkadina when her son recalls her charitable behaviour to an injured laundress. 'I don't remember,' says Trigorin when he is shown the gull he ordered stuffed and mounted in memory of his interview with Nina.
In the last act, the two-year hiatus also sets the characters' development in sharper highlight. Arkadina, Trigorin and the older generation have remained the same; Sorin's stasis has even been intensified by his illness. The only characters to have undergone change are the four young people. Nina and Masha have both compromised their fantasies, Masha by hanging about Treplyov even though she knows her love is hopeless, and Nina by persevering, though aware that stardom is out of her reach. Med- vedenko has become more subdued, less anxious to correct his wife; his insistent material worries have modulated into low-keyed domestic fretting. Treplyov has forgotten why he wants to write, although he persists at it. If Nina and Masha are about to turn into pallid versions of Arkadina and Polina, Medvedenko and Treplyov do not have the stamina to become even Shamrayev and Trigorin. The repetition of the monologue from Treplyov's play makes clear the distance travelled between Acts One and Four.
Another new form that Chekhov practised in The Seagull was an emblematic progression of locales. 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 platform stage. This particular region is remote from the main house, and Treplyov has chosen it as his private turf: the characters who come to make up his audience must enter his world of shadows and damp (Polina fears the Doctor will catch cold), and they spend only a brief time there, before returning to safe norms evoked by the strains of the piano drifting into the clearing. Treplyov wants his work of art to be seen as co-existent with nature, with the 'spellbinding lake,' as Dorn calls it; ironically, his man-made stage prevents people from walking to the lake which his mother identifies with 'laughter, noise, shooting, and one romance after another,' ordinary diversions 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 be seen now in the bright light of the sun, not the pallid rays of the moon; but the surrounding verdure is a 'croquet lawn'. Such lawns must be well-kempt, not unlike Arkadina herself, who 'keeps myself in trim, as the saying goes, and I'm always dressed and have my hair done in the latest style'. Notably, Treplyov is the only member of the family circle who does not go into the house during the act. It stands for