In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chehov's Magic Lake: A Reading of The Seagull kEITH SAGAR • IN MODERN DRAMA, (SEPTEMBER, 1965) Dorothy U. Seyler suggests, in a most unconvincing article, that Chehov's seagull is a parody of Ibsen's wild duck. She tries to pass off Chehov's remark to A. L. Vishnevsky that Ibsen was his favourite author as a "family joke" by setting against it a number of Chehov's criticis111s of Ibsen plays, including The Wild Duck. All these criticisms are of Ibsen's ideas, not his technique, except the reference to the white horses in Rosmershoim, which are certainly far less effective symbols and far less organic than the wild duck. There is every reason to believe that Chehov at that stage of his career would admire the way in which Ibsen had succeeded in breaking through the usual limitations of naturalism by incorporating "naturalistic" symbols such as the wild duck. Miss Seyler's case rests on her assumption that the seagull symbol is "too consciously contrived to be taken completely seriously." The point of this essay is to see how seriously we can take it. Raymond Williams1 starts from the opposite assumption about Chehov's attitude to Ibsen, but ftom the same assumption that the seagull symbol is contrived. He suggests that in The Seagull Chehov simply decided to tryout Ibsen's "new formula," and that the seagull's death has a simple illustrative one-for-one correspondence with the destruction of Nina at the hands of Trigorin (Chehov could hardly have underlined it more heavily) and little other validity except as a means of artificially inflating the significance of the incidents with vague hints of profundity. But there are several important questions about the seagull Mr. Williams never asks. Why a seagull, specifically, on a country estate not far from Moscow? Why is it Trepliov and not Trigorin Who shoots it? In what sense, beyond that of a Victorian morality we have no right to foist onto Chehov, can Nina be said to have been "destroyed" by Trigorin? 441 442 KEITH SAGAR It is interesting that Mr. Williams begins his account of the function of the seagull with a serious mistake. Chehov introduces it, he tells us, in the middle of the second act, at the point where Trepliov's play has failed and he is about to lose Nina to Trigorin. In fact it is introduced very near the beginning of the first act, when Nina makes her first appearance: Mr father and stepmother won't let me come here. They say this place is Bohemian ... they're afraid of my going on the stage. And I am drawn to this place, to this lake, as if I were a seagull.2 Since, at this stage of the play, Nina has not even met Trigorin, we must look where Chehov actually points for the relevance of the seagull. It is specifically related to three things: Nina's "imprisonment" at home, her vocation for the stage, and the lake to which she is "drawn." The significance of the lake would be further underlined for a Russian audience by Nina's surname Zaryechnaia, which means "across or beyond the water." When Trigorin at the end of Act II outlines his subject for a short story he says: A young girl, like you, has lived beside a lake from childhood. She loves the lake as a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. The whole point about Nina at this stage of the play is that she is not "happy and free" but miserable and confined, as, surely, a seagull is on an inland lake which is not its natural habitat. Trigorin turns Nina's situation into a middle-brow writer's cliche-situation as he does again when he speaks of her being "destroyed" by a passing man like a bird by a hunter. He is wrong about her past and is to be wrong about her future. He is very good at describing moonlight on a broken bottle, but he can't imagine what it feels like to be eighteen or nineteen - "that's why the girls in my novels are usually so artificial...

pdf

Share