In a later letter to Suvorin he says of the play: “I began it forte and ended it pianissimo—contrary to all the rules of dramatic art…. [it] will be altered a million times before the coming season.”
On top of that there is the censor. The privileged Tolstoy had absolutely refused to alter a line of The Power of Darkness. It was played exactly as he wrote it. Not so with Chekhov.
The play is The Seagull. As is well known, the first performance in Petersburg was a disaster, chiefly because Chekhov had allowed a popular music-hall actress—who had no part in the play—to use the occasion for her benefit night, and so a large part of the audience was drawn from fans of her romping farces. From the moment of Nina’s exalted speech about the World Spirit, beginning
Men, lions, eagles, partridges, horned deer, … silent fishes, denizens of the deep, starfish and creatures invisible—in a word all life, all life has completed its cycle and died. For thousands of centuries Earth has not borne a single living creature…. Eternal Matter has turned them to stones, water, clouds …
and on to the claim
That World Spirit am I…. Within me is the soul of Alexander the Great, of Caesar, Shakespeare and Napoleon and of the most miserable leech …
Chekhov was satirizing a current fad. The audience shouted out “Intellectual rot” and were soon in a state of riot. When the dead seagull was brought in, a wit sitting next to a friend of Chekhov’s shouted out, “Why does this Apollonsky [the actor who played Treplev] carry a dead duck about with him?” Hiding alone in a dressing room, Chekhov was appalled at what seemed to him an attack on his person, and left the theater. He said, “Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play.”
When we look at the intimate sources of the play, we see that there was private embarrassment among Chekhov’s closest friends. Chekhov’s sister arranged for Lika Mizinova to go with her on the second night. Potapenko, who had made Lika pregnant but done nothing to help when their child was born, brought his wife with him. There were fears of “confrontations.” There was also the question of the suicidal Levitan, the painter, who had earlier threatened a libel action when he had been portrayed years before in Chekhov’s story The Grasshopper, but had recanted. Chekhov had once been called urgendy, to a country house, near a lake, to save Levitan’s life. He had attempted to shoot himself in the presence of a lady who had turned down his advances. And there was another real-life incident, which had occurred when he and Chekhov had gone out to shoot woodcock. Levitan had wounded a bird and was too distressed to kill it and had made Chekhov do the nasty job. There was no trouble with Levitan or with Potapenko after the play but Lika Mizinova did make one disturbing straightforward comment: “Everyone says The Seagull was borrowed from my life but also that you gave a good dressing down to a certain person.” Who was that? Mizinova’s defaulting lover Potapenko, obviously. But he was not the only one of Chekhov’s friends to be pilloried, however obliquely, in The Seagull. The other was Lydia Avilova, who was still pursuing him, and to whom he sent a disguised teasing message in the text of the play.
What is certain is that The Seagull stands alone among Chekhov’s plays, a marvelous lyrical experiment never repeated. It is spontaneously personal and quite unlike any of the plays he had written before. His earlier play, Ivanov, was dominated by a declamatory hero, the confession of the private guilt of a ruined landowner. Except for Nina’s family the people of The Seagull are not traditional landowners. They are Bohemian artists, deep in literary confessions and theatrical illusions. The detached observer of their follies is a doctor. At the center of the play is the conflict of the young artists—the playwright Treplev and his sweetheart, Nina—with Treplev’s mother, the famous and parsimonious old-style actress Arkadina, who talks only of her successful career. The deeper conflict is Oedipal. Chekhov borrows from Hamlet: Treplev is a young Hamlet, his mother is an absurd Gertrude seen in Shakespeare’s dire “play within a play.” The sexual jealousy is powerful and not concealed. The famous words “enseamed bed” are said to have been there; the censor was so shocked he cut them out.
The slave to literature is Trigorin, Arkadina’s lover. He draws Nina to him by telling her that his fame and glory as a novelist are empty; its fine effects are produced by cynical slavery to sentences. A writer who is enslaved by a famous actress, he says, is a prisoner.
Is Trigorin Chekhov’s self-portrait? A good deal comes from Potapenko, the facile and popular best seller. Treplev, who hates Trigorin and dismisses him as a popular fiction machine, even picks out one of Chekhov’s well-known sentences, in which he wrote that a gleam of moonlight is best evoked by pointing to the gleam reflected on a broken bottle. Trigorin’s main resemblance to Chekhov lies in the keeping of notebooks in which he writes down subjects and people for stories, their mannerisms and absurdities, listing images and phrases that will be useful. He frankly tells Nina that words of hers will be useful in the novel he is writing. He has, he says, no personal life. There is the moment when, happening to see a cloud pass by, he suddenly sees it comically as “a grand piano” and writes the sentence at once in case it will at some time become useful. Chekhov’s Selected Notebooks are indeed filled with bizarre sentences he has heard and characters he has met. At one point Trigorin is most certainly Chekhov when, talking of the hollowness of fame, he says that when he dies people will say, “A good writer, but not as good as Turgenev.” Still, there is in Trigorin a good deal of Potapenko, who had gone off with Lika Mi-zinova and who annoyed Chekhov by the machinelike speed of his writing: a real best seller, and a seducer of women.
The interest of The Seagull lies in its break with traditional theater. The play is at once lyrical and bizarre: it mocks conventions. Chekhov has been excited by the new European playwrights—Ibsen (though he thought Ibsen novelized far too much), Hauptmann, Maeterlinck and above all, it strikes one, by the Strindberg of Miss Julie. Strindberg’s short stories had loosened the restraints of formal speech and had released the spontaneous, even the incongruous, common utterance. The classic chorus had replaced the formal rhetoric of the ruling gods. That drilled moaning is now stopped; the crowds speak up variously; they are the gods now. They have replaced rhetoric by the utterance of their own histories and fantasies, each man and woman a walking inconsequent, self-portrayed creature carrying his own play about with him.
Why does the exalted young Treplev shoot himself at the end of the play? He has lost the love of Nina, the dream of success. His suicide is a revenge on his mother and her lover. His inner drama is too much for him. His vision of what theater ought to be, his desire to “go to the top” instantly, cannot be fulfilled because he lacks Nina’s stamina, her willingness to go through the mill as an actress. There is something else: The Seagull is “strange” in its mingling of the artifices and isolating demands of art, the conflict with reality—that is to say, between two hostile realities. It is an alluring mixture of the poetic and the dire, an extravagant and disturbing dream.
At Melikhovo Chekhov tried to rid himself of his anger at the reception of The Seagull by turning to a new subject. His exhausting labor on the census had given him a theme of which he had long experience: the Russian peasant. We have already had a sight of the violence of peasant life in My Life, which was at last published after a struggle with the censor; surprisingly, the public and the critics had little or nothing to say about it. Now, in The Peasants, villagers themselves fill the pages. This story made a powerful impression on its readers; it aroused a political storm, especially among Marxists and Populists, because Chekhov seemed hostile to the peasantry, which he was not; the Marxists welcomed his unvarnished picture but the Populists protested against it. There is no doubt that The Peasants is one of Chekhov’s masterpieces and, on the same theme, will be surpassed only by In the Ravine, written a year or two later.