Collected
Plays by Anton ChekhovChekhov is inexhaustible,
because, despite the everyday life he appears to depict in his plays,
he is really talking all the time not of the accidental and specific,
but of the Human, with the capital ‘ h’/ This is his basic spiritual
leitmotif.The ability to turn ideas into behaviour was Antov
Chekhov’s great gift to 20th century theatre. What makes Chekhov’s
psychological interpretations so modern is his perception that people
are motivated more by what is outside them than what is within. Words come before meanings, people take their identities first of all from others, falling prey to their own suggestibility. That
is why faithlessness and compromi9ses are not such moral failings in
Chekhov as the inevitable consequences of sheer human vacuity. Chekhov
often said that he wanted to depict ‘real life’, both in his plays and
short
stories, as it is
lived by ordinary people: “A play should be
written in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the
weather, and play cards. Like must be exactly as it is, and people, as
they are – not on stilts… Let everything on the stage be just as
complicated, and at the same time just as it is in life.”Chekov
always put life before
art in his plays but the distinction is made
nowhere more insistently than in “The
Seagull”. But given Chekhov’s
exacting demands, the problem was how to enact it. Anything affected
was anathema. Not even Stanislavsky could produce the requisite
lightness of touch, for, his ‘method acting’ infused his characters
with an inner motivation and psychological rationale, which were, all
too often, precisely what they lacked. Chekhov’s characters are not
driven by some great cause like the heroes of a Greek tragedy, but by
their irrational selves. ‘The Seagull” tackles a theme that
was central to Chekhov’s ways of feeling: humbug in the word of art,
which is divorced from life as it is. No other play features so many
creative artists. Everyone calls upon art to give some meaning
to their lives. If only to give some meaning to their lives. If only
life could be lives as art! But they are patently doing things the
wrong way round.
Trigorin is a successful author whose borrowed sheen
not only inspires Konstatin, but his actress mother and would-be
girlfriend as well. Trigorin is praised for bringing characters so
marvelously to life, but it is at some cost. Because trigorin
cannibalizes the present; no sooner is a moment lived or a kiss kissed
than it is put down in a notebook, to be recycled in the next novella.
This is humbug, not life as it happens day after day. Trigorin
jots down in his notebook the plot of the story that he’s in: a man
comes along and destroys a young girl’s life, simply for lack of
anything better to do (“We are all bore “ is one of the central themes
of Chekhov’s short stories.) The destructiveness is self-fulfilling.
Konstantin yearns to do the same, to fuse art with experience and to
breathe life into his otherwise wooden characterizations. . But ends up
neither writing nor living; he realized he is ‘inauthentic to the
marrow of my bones’. He tears up his papers in despair and shoots
himself in the last scene. His one grand gesture – the killing of the
seagull – is as meaningless as the farce of his school
Play and for the
same reason: doesn’t mean a thing. The seagull isn’t his girlfriend.
Nina, the loved creature of the lake. Nor is it a symbol of lost love,
lost hope. A dead bird is a dead bird period. Chekhov was just that: a
realist, first and last. Chekhov had famously said elsewhere that “
there are a great many opinions in this world and a good half of those
are professed by people who have never been in trouble” “the Seagull”
is merely an extension of this experience of life lived as received
wisdom rather than seen through, warts and all. With its
profound suspicion o artists and of art, “the Seagull” would appear to
back the unmediatedlife, spontaneous and lived to the full. This is a
ruse for deflecting out attention from the work we are watching,
differentiating it from the painted stage in order to make it seem all
the more natural and ‘real; But in Chekhov’s case, the disillusionment
with art is so intense that what we get is not so much art which
conceals art as an art which disavows it. “The Seagull” tries hard not
to be a play; it wants to show life as it is with all its pretences.
That is why all Chekhov's plays and the majority of his short stories,
despite their flashes of humour, impresses one as infinitely sad, dull
as they are of frustration, disappointed hopes, and unfulfilled
longings – all because we are busy aping others, not being true to
ourselves.
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