The Seagull at Rep Stage 2004-2005
Background Materials
Lisa
A. Wilde, Dramaturg
The
artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only
job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled
conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound
to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions
is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is,
to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my
characters in the proper light and speak their language.
–Chekhov, in a letter to his
publisher and mentor, Alexey Suvorin (1888)
Names
Russians are given
only one name by their parents: their first name usually the name of a saint in
the Russian Orthodox church. A person’s “saint’s day” or “name day” is often
more important than his or her birthday (think of Irina’s in The Three
Sisters!) The middle name is a patronymic. It is the father’s name + ovich/evich
or for men (“son of”) or + ovna/evna for women (“daughter of”). The last name is
often a family name, or indicates the nationality of the person’s ancestors. It
always ends in a consonant for men and a vowel for women. Women do take their
husband’s last names; the fact that Arkadina’s surname is different than both
her son’s and her brother’s may indicate that she has been married to someone
other than Treplev’s father.
The names you use to address
someone indicate the level of formality. To address someone properly you would
use his or her first name and patronymic, while you would use someone’s first
name only if you are on familiar terms, the same age or superior in class
(everyone calls Yakov solely by his first name as he is the lowest socially
ranked character). The most intimate and/or patronizing connection is
demonstrated by using the diminutive (“Kostya” for Konstantin, “Petrusha” for
Sorin and “Mashenka” for “Masha” which is in fact a nickname for Marya).
Below I have listed
everyone’s full names with distinctive Russian meanings for each:
Irina (“peace”)
Nikolayevna (daughter of Nikolai) Arkadina
Konstantin (“constant”)
Gavrilovich (son of Gavril or Gabriel) Treplev (Kostya)
Nina (“grace”)
Mikhailovna (daughter of Mikhail) Zarechnaya (“Zarya” means “dawn”
and “zarechnaya” “across the water”)
Pyotr (“rock”)
Nikolayevich (son of Nikolai) Sorin (Petrusha):
Ilya (“My god is
Yahweh” – from Elijah) Afanasyevich (son of Afanasa) Shamrayev
Polina (“little”)
Andreyevna (daughter of Andrey) Shamrayeva
Masha (“bitter”) (Marya
Ilyinichna) (daughter of Ilya) (Mashenka)
Boris (“fighter”
“wolf”) Alexeyevich (son of Alexei) Trigorin
Yevgeny (“noble”)
Sergeyevich (Sergeich) (son of Sergei) Dorn (Dorn is a German name,
indicating a kind of outsider status)
Semyon (“God is heard”)
Semyonovich (son of Semyon or Jr.) Medvedenko (Medvedenko is a
name of Ukrainian origin, suggesting a slight cultural inferiority. “Medved”
means “bear”)
Yakov (“supplanter”)
Historical Context:
In
1861, millions of serfs were freed by Tsar Alexander II (Chekhov’s grandfather
was a serf) an event with many parallels to the American emancipation of slaves.
They were given some poor land but the government expected that both the serfs
and the serfless (and now clueless) estate owners
would now be able to make
payments to the government and increase Russia's exports -- which they did not.
The gentry’s economic decline
continued rapidly after 1861; unable to compete with the freed peasant labor and
more impoverished than ever, by the end of the century many estates were
eventually sold to the new small but rising middle class. The nineteenth century
also saw a population explosion. Russia also experienced an industrial
revolution but they were less able to move as quickly as America and Europe.
The
intelligentsia (writers and thinkers who were not just educated but also had
social concerns ) -- particularly Tolstoi -- supported the serfs and the
movement towards modernism , a movement squashed by Tsar Alexander III after his
father was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. By the 1860s, the
intelligentsia had largely been replaced by radical nihilists – the topic of
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The resulting censorship, influence of Marx,
and poor working conditions all spurred the desire for revolution.
On January 9, 1905 , there was a protest march in St. Petersburg
that was put down by armed force with more than 1,000 killed or injured. This
event spurred many groups including the peasants , the workers , the liberals ,
the armed forces and minority national groups to move into active protest.
The revolutionary movement
climaxed in 1917 with the overthrow of the provisional
government that had replaced the Russian Tsar system (Nicholas II first
abdicated the throne and was later assassinated with his family) and led to the
establishment of the Soviet Union under a government first led by Lenin and the
Bolshevik party.
Chekhov emphasized the value
of work (see Nina and various characters in Vanya and Three Sisters)
over the increasingly aimless and what he would call superfluous (l’homme qui
a voulu) upper-class. Clearly in his plays there is a sense of an old world
ending symbolized by the old servants who are unwilling to be emancipated
and wouldn't know what to do if they are not connected to the estates.
A Russian family circa 1890
A preschool system was introduced in Russia at the very end of the nineteenth
century, and by 1917, the empire could count only roughly two hundred
kindergartens, with a total enrollment of only 5,400 children. In 1840, only 5
out of every thousand persons were enrolled in primary or secondary education.
In 1890, this number had risen to 21; and in 1914, to 59 per thousand. Totals
for university students showed corresponding rates of 0.1, 0.1, and 0.8 per
thousand.(source: A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917)
Theatrical Context
The
nineteenth century from the 1850s on saw a huge movement throughout Europe
towards more realistic representation in all art forms, particularly fiction and
theater, and in theater, a movement away from melodrama and Scribe’s predictable
well-made plays. Arkadina – as we know from her reputation in Camille,
one of the all-time tearjerkers—represents the melodramatic style of theater. Turgenev,
Maupassant and Tolstoy were all realistic writers. Trigorin, who is compared
with Turgenev would be representative of realistic if somewhat dated writing (Turgenev
was writing in the 1860s). George Bernard Shaw in England, Henrik Ibsen in
Norway and Chekhov in Russia were the greatest proponents of theatrical realism,
a style concerned with both replicating life on stage and exposing current
social concerns. All three desired, through their plays, to free individuals
from the illusions and lies that trapped them in social conventions and personal
paralysis. The end of the century saw a tremendous upheaval in artistic forms:
Dadaism, futurism, symbolism and expressionism all emerged as reactions to
realism, demonstrating the artists’ desire to explore dream states and the
individual unconscious rather than social issues. Treplev’s play seems similar
to that of the Symbolists, displaying a certain narcissism and apocalyptic
nihilism while moving away from the social conscience of the intelligentsia. Two
of the greatest symbolist artists in the theater were Maeterlinck
(interestingly, a writer Chekhov respected greatly) for The Blue Bird and
Strindberg for A Dream Play. Chekhov scholar Richard Gilman has also seen
the play as “the worst of German Expressionist drama of a generation later, in
its whole tone and in specific lines such as “I am the Great World Spirit.”
Wedekind and Kaiser were both expressionistic writers and the films The
Strange Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Machinal captured the
expressionist’s tone and vision. In both expressionism and symbolism, characters
do not have specific names but are identified by roles such as “The Father”;
“The Spinster” etc. For the symbolists, structure was random, chaotic and
intuitive while for the expressionists, structure was disjointed and episodic.
Expressionist works display reality through the perspective of the psyche, often
revealing personal fears and concerns while the symbolists believed that the
deepest truths of existence be indirectly conveyed by symbol, myth, and mood.
Dacha Life
The dacha is a summer dwelling
(as you can see from the pictures, it is not necessarily a “cottage”) often
located only a few hours outside of a major city. Dacha settlements served as a
kind of “suburb” for city dwellers. In the nineteenth century, these dachas
demonstrated that one had a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Dachas provided
a refuge from the crowded and often dirty cities during the summer months. Life
in the dachas for the “summerfolk” or “dachniki” was one of leisurely idleness,
private property carved out of agricultural areas and intellectual and cultural
discussions —a kind of salon life. As the nineteenth century came to an end,
this lifestyle provoked hostility from the working class and revolutionaries who
felt that the country needed more workers and workable land. Both Gorki’s play
“Summerfolk” and Chekhov’s plays gently satirize the habits of the idle gentry.
This is the dacha in which Pushkin and his wife lived in 1831.
Here
is a contemporary account of dacha life:
On a summer weekend Moscow looks deserted. City residents leave Moscow since
Friday afternoon, by cars, buses, local trains. This outwards movement is
universal, while the transportation and destinations of course depend on the
wealth. The richest relax on their way out of Moscow on the back seats of luxury
cars; the moderately successful now or before drive their cars and only the
model and the year of build can tell how fresh and strong has been the luck.
Others, hardly the majority anymore, take the crowded trains. Destinations for
the millions of people have all the same confusing name, dacha. But the meaning
of the word is seriously different depending on who use it.
For
some, a dacha is a tiny shack in the middle of small vegetable garden where
every square inch is used to produce something eatable and storable for the
coming fall and winter. For others, it is a huge cottage surrounded by lawns,
flowerbeds, and other masterpieces of landscape architects...
For most Muscovites it is a relatively small, of two or
three rooms, house sitting on a patch of land of six sotok (approximately 0.15
acres) - this size was an official standard for "garden land" allowed for a
dweller of a Soviet city or town to rent from the Soviet State, the ultimate
land owner. Even now the popular newspaper for dacha owners is called "Six Sotok",
this area associated for the masses with a dacha patch of land.
Dacha is the best place for BBQ parties (called "shashlyk"
parties here), samovar tea parties, singing songs with guitar, swimming in the
rivers or lakes, taking sun baths, biking, hanging around for teenagers.-
Andrey Brant
From A Study Guide on Chekhov’s The Seagull
Researched and written for
Theatre de la Jeune Lune
by Cynthia C. Ramsey
February 2003
A Brief Biography
January 17, 1860:
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is
born into a large family in Taganrog, a small town on the Sea of Azov in
southern Russia. As opposed to most 19th-century Russian writers, who came
either from the aristocracy or from the rising civil servant class, Chekhov’s
beginnings are peasant and provincial: his paternal grandfather was a serf who,
through sheer hard labor, saved 3500 rubles to purchase himself and his family
out of serfdom in 1841, twenty years before the official emancipation of the
serfs in Russia.
1860s: Chekhov’s
father led a strict household, with the children’s time divided among school,
working in his grocery store, strict daily observance of Russian Orthodox Church
worship, and generous helpings of corporal discipline. However, the siblings
were close: Chekhov’s older brother Alexander’s memoirs recount the family’s
enactment of several merry family theatricals, mostly authored and performed by
Anton. Chekhov’s mother was a wonderful storyteller.
1868-1879: Chekhov
attends school at the local gymnazija, a sort of government junior high
and high school. In 1876, the family grocery business fails, and Chekhov’s
bankrupt father flees with the family to Moscow, leaving Chekhov alone in
Taganrog to finish school. He supports himself for three years by tutoring, and
develops his interest in theater by sneaking into local productions.
1879: Chekhov joins
his family in Moscow and enrolls in the medical school at Moscow State
University, on partial scholarship. While in school, Chekhov also provides the
main source of income to his family by writing sketches for humor journals,
producing 200-300 per year in the early 1880s. The beginning of Chekhov’s
professional writing career coincides with the end of the Golden Age of Russian
Realism and the beginning of a largely dry spell in Russian literature. Chekhov
is the only generally acknowledged genius and widely read author from this
period.
1884: Chekhov
graduates from medical school. Though he would practice medicine
intermittently for the rest of his life, it never provided him any income, since
he largely treated peasants and poor workers at provincial clinics free of
charge. In the same year, Chekhov suffers his first hemorrhage from
tuberculosis. He would hide the disease’s existence from others for several
years, though he himself was well aware that from the age of 24 he was living
under a death sentence.
1886: The powerful
publishing magnate Alexey Suvorin takes on Chekhov as one of his writers.
Also in 1886, then-famous writer Dmitry Grigorovich “discovers” Chekhov, and
sends him a letter encouraging him to take his work more seriously. Chekhov
takes the advice with great honor.
late 1880s-early 1890s:
Chekhov makes the transition to become a real, critically-recognized,
full-blown, mature artist. His greatest prose pieces are written after 1888, and
he begins to really see himself more as an artist and less of an entertainer. By
the1890s, Chekhov’s popularity has become widespread, and he devotes less time
and energy to prose and more to drama.
October 1896: Disastrous
first staging of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St.
Petersburg.
1897: Chekhov
experiences severe hemorrhaging, causing him to acknowledge the seriousness of
his tuberculosis. In 1899 he abandons his beloved estate Melikhovo for the
warmer climate of Yalta, on the Crimean Sea. Chekhov never recovers from what he
considered exile from the Moscow literary and theatrical worlds. Written
1895-1896, Uncle Vanya is first staged in the Russian provinces.
December 1898: The
Seagull receives its second hugely successful premiere at the Moscow Art
Theater (MAT), which becomes known as “Chekhov’s theater.”
October 1899: Uncle
Vanya opens at MAT to great success. In 1900, in celebration of the
centennial, the company performs the play in Yalta for Chekhov, unable to
travel. Chekhov falls in love with Olga Knipper, who plays Elena.
1901:
In January, The Three Sisters (written 1899-1900, inspired by Knipper)
premieres to mixed reviews (but universal praise for Knipper’s portrayal of
Masha) at MAT. In May, Chekhov and Olga Knipper are married. He stays in Yalta,
while she continues to work as an actress in Moscow, visiting frequently.
Chekhov’s tuberculosis continues to worsen, slowing his work and productivity.
1904: In January,
The Cherry Orchard (written 1903) premieres on Chekhov’s birthday at
MAT—again, to mixed reviews. Knipper will play the role of Varya to great
acclaim for the rest of her life. In April, in response to his declining health,
Chekhov’s doctors send him abroad to a spa in Badenweiler, Germany, for
treatment. Attended by Knipper, Chekhov dies on the night of July 2. His body is
shipped back to Russia in a train car marked “oysters”; he is buried in the
cemetery of the Novo-Devichy Monastery in Moscow.
The Gossip: Biographical
Sources for Plot and Character
Lydia Mizinova, nicknamed “Lika,”
is the first of three Lydias in Chekhov’s life to
provide material for The
Seagull. Mizinova was a friend of Chekhov’s sister Masha; her
unrequited love for Chekhov
drove her into the arms of the writer Potapenko. In 1894
the two ran off to Europe
together, but when Mizinova became pregnant, Potapenko, who
was married to his second
wife, abandoned her cold-heartedly in Switzerland.
Mizinova’s infant died three
weeks following The Seagull’s St. Petersburg premiere, echoing the fate
of Nina’s child in a sad instance of life imitating art.
The second Lydia, Lydia
Avilova, a pretty young St. Petersburg wife and aspiring short story writer,
pursued Chekhov romantically with great determination. In 1947, more than
four decades after his death,
she published a detailed memoir chronicling her longtime
tortured love affair with
Chekhov; the affair has since been proven to be a complete fiction. Avilova gave
Chekhov a medallion inscribed with the with a page and line
number from his latest
collection; it referred to a line from his 1891 story “Neighbors”:
“If you should need my life,
come and take it.” Chekhov not only used the line and its
delivery through a story
reference verbatim in the play for Nina’s gift to Trigorin, but he actually
loaned the medallion to the prop master for the St. Petersburg production. To
Avilova’s horror, he
ultimately gave the medallion away to the talented actress who first portrayed
Nina, Vera Kommisarzhevskaya, as a memento of her performance.
The character Arkadina is
based upon the third Lydia from Chekhov’s life, Lydia Yavorskaya, a flamboyant
and ruthless actress with whom Chekhov had a two- year affair. Self-centered in
the extreme, Yavorskaya had also married beneath her class in
Kiev at the beginning of her
career, starred in La Dame aux camélias, and, apparently, once begged
Chekhov on her knees not to leave her.
Vladimir Suvorin, the younger
son of Chekhov’s publisher, mentor, and friend Alexey Suvorin, shot himself when
he was twenty-one years old. Even before he would use
Vladimir’s suicide as a model
for Treplev’s, Chekhov wrote a story in 1888 called
“Volodya” (a nickname for
“Vladimir”), in which the hero shoots himself as a protest of his mother’s
social lies and pretensions, and due to his despair over his own clumsy
sexuality. In addition, Chekhov named the Zarechnys’ dog, Trezor, after
Suvorin’s.
The manic-depressive landscape
artist Isaac Levitan provided much fertile material for The Seagull. In
1892, on a hunting trip with Chekhov, Levitan pointlessly shot a
woodcock; Chekhov recorded the
unfeeling event in a letter to Suvorin, writing, “One
less beautiful, loving
creature on this earth, while two fools returned home and sat down to supper.”
In the summer of 1895, Levitan grazed his temple with a revolver bullet in a
suicide attempt, after being discovered by his lover Anna Turchaninova to have
seduced her daughter. In an effort to aid his friend’s recovery, Chekhov
traveled to the
Turchaninov family estate,
located in the north and situated by a lake filled with seagulls.
Keep in mind: as members of
Russia’s literary and theatrical elite, all of these people—
Mizinova, Potapenko,
Potapenko’s wife, Avilova, Yavorskaya, Suvorin, and Levitan—
either attended the St.
Petersburg premiere of The Seagull or attended an earlier reading of the
play staged in Moscow.
Finally, Chekhov himself
shared several of Trigorin’s defining characteristics: a love of
fishing; the drive to
compulsively write, day and night; a deep concern for his place in the
literary canon—Chekhov’s
letters to Suvorin from 1892-3 contain anxious self- comparison; and the
unfavorable comparison by others with Zola, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, in which
Chekhov often came up short by the standards of the 1880s and 1890s, which
judged artists first by the zeal of social commitment and secondly by their
talent.
Chekhov was shy and taciturn,
except one-on-one, and often described as disarmingly polite, all
characteristics of Trigorin. However, perhaps the way in which Trigorin most
resembles Chekhov is in his
relentless need to steal from his life to feed his art, in his use of his fellow
characters’ personal lives in his writing, his “autobiographophobia”
notwithstanding.
The Hamlet Subtext
Shakespeare remained the
dramatological gold standard for Chekhov throughout his playwrighting life. In
1882, at 22 years of age, he published a passionate literary article on
Hamlet (which he had read, like all of Shakespeare, in translation). In the
article he
called for Shakespeare to be
performed everywhere in Russia, in order to educate young
actors and let in fresh air on
the then-stagnant Russian stage. The Seagull, the first play
in which Chekhov really comes
into maturity as a playwright, bears the strongest traces
of Hamlet of all of the
four final plays.
First of all, Chekhov
emphasizes the Oedipal aspect of the Hamlet-Gertrude relationship in the
relationship between Treplev and Arkadina. We first see Treplev plucking petals
off a daisy to see whether his
mother loves him, as opposed to our expectation that he might use the daisy to
more appropriately learn about Nina. Act I also contains Hamlet’s
erotically charged
confrontation with Gertrude, quoted specifically to one another by Chekhov’s
mother and son. As Paul Schmidt notes, this scene is a set-up for the
emotionally charged bandaging
scene in Act III, itself a parody of the frankly erotic Gertude-Hamlet closet
scene. Treplev confesses to Arkadina, “The last few days, I’ve
loved you the way I did when I
was little. Totally, tenderly. You’re all I’ve got. Only
there’s that man—he always
comes between us!” Even after it becomes clear to Treplev
and Arkadina that their
respective lovers are falling in love with each other, Treplev still
shows more concern that
Trigorin will get in the way of his relationship with his mother
as opposed to with Nina.
In a reference to Laertes and
Hamlet’s duel at the end of the play, Trigorin reveals at the
beginning of Act III that
Treplev has challenged him to a duel. Although the issue in
contention might at first
glance appear to be Nina/Ophelia, it’s clear that Trigorin has
only flirted with Nina by the
end of Act II—the seduction will take place in Moscow, between Acts III and IV.
Therefore, the implication is that this challenge to a duel must have stemmed
either from Treplev’s artistic jealousy, or, just as likely, from Treplev’s
resulting jealousy over Trigorin’s sexual appropriation of Arkadina.
Trigorin twice plays the part
of Claudius to Treplev’s Hamlet, effectively usurping Treplev’s place in both
Arkadina’s and Nina’s hearts. And though Treplev’s tries to
assign the identity of Hamlet
on Trigorin when he enters the room reading in Act II, in doing so he is forced
to utter Hamlet’s line, “Words, words, words…,” thus further demonstrating his
own better suitedness to the role. The comic, pathetic Sorin, a ghost of
the person he always wishes to
be is the stand- in for Hamlet’s father, though he can offer his “son” Treplev
no good advice when Treplev describes his mother’s shortcomings.
The Seagull also refers
directly to Hamlet with Hamlet/Treplev’s play-within- the-play device. To
test Claudius’ conscience and communicate with his mother, Hamlet chooses
the play The Mousetrap,
saying, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of a king.”
Similarly, Treplev’s play is a direct challenge to his mother and the theatrical
conventions of her generation,
a mousetrap of sorts in which, through her adherence to an
outdated theatrical style, she
shows the age she is normally so cautious to hide (and for
which she resents the presence
of Treplev).
Like Hamlet and Ophelia,
Treplev and Nina’s love affair has already peaked before the
beginning of the play, and we
learn about it chiefly through the comments of others. The
relationship is already under
some strain when we first meet the lovers—in Hamlet the
strain results from the death
of the king and Hamlet’s growing suspicions towards his uncle, and in The
Seagull from the appearance of Arkadina and her successful younger writer.
Treplev’s pointless killing and presentation of the seagull to Nina, along with
his
accusations of her
unfaithfulness (a transference of his anger over his mother’s
unfaithfulness to him) echo
Hamlet’s cruel torment of the bewildered Ophelia for the sins of Gertrude’s
sexuality. To the very end of the play, Treplev regrets his vacillating
behavior towards Nina, but
seems powerless to stop it.
Nina is otherwise strongly
connected with Ophelia: she hands out flowers to Dorn and at
the end of the play appears to
have come mentally unhinged. Trigorin uses her for the
production of his fiction in
the same way that Polonius uses Ophelia to try to ensnare Hamlet. Though she
doesn’t drown herself, her constant association with water evokes
Ophelia’s watery end: she is
drawn to the lake, leaves Konstantin’s study in a rainstorm,
and even asks for a glass of
water before she goes, as if to really make the point. Nina herself makes the
connection with Rusalka, Alexander Pushkin’s poem about a seduced,
impregnated, and abandoned
maiden who drowns in a river. Finally, the Maupassant
piece Arkadina, Dorn, and
Masha are reading aloud is Sur l’eau.
Hamlet was a central figure
for many Russian writers, because of the development of the literary archetype
of the “superfluous man” (lishnii chelovek), an educated, well-meaning
protagonist who is powerless to act. Both Treplev and Sorin fulfill this role,
both of them “un homme qui a voulu.” Hamlet is so incapacitated that he
is even unable to commit to taking his own life. Nina’s quotation from
Turgenev’s Rudin, however, provides a
different path for Treplev,
since Rudin, a prototypical superfluous man, ends his short life after his
youthful dreams fail to come to fruition. While Hamlet endlessly contemplates
suicide, Treplev finally
carries it out.
(Much of this material on
The Seagull’s Hamlet subtext is adapted from Richard Peace’s
pioneering work on the
subject, Chekhov: A Study of the Four Plays.)