Chehov's Magic Lake: A Reading of The Seagull
Chehov's Magic Lake: A Reading of The Seagull
Chehov's Magic Lake: A Reading of The Seagull
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
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 clich-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." . .. "In the end I feel that all I can do is to paint
landscapes, and that everything else I write is a sham false to the very
core."
For a caged seagull a lake would represent freedom. So for Nina, at the
beginning, the lake beckons her as offering her only escape. All her dreams
focus on it. Here she can meet famous people, and here, above all, she can
act. The stage is a rickety structure nailed together by the peasants, the script
is pretentious nonsense, the audience small and inattentive, but it is a start, it
is acting. But once Nina has spread her wings, she is drawn to the Sorin estate
no longer, but begins to feel confined there and dreams now of Moscow and
the real theatre. She longs for fame as an actress and that she will never find
on the lakeside:
For the sake of being happy like that of being a writer or an actress
I would put up with unfriendliness from my family, with poverty and
disappointment, with living in a garret and having nothing to eat but
rye bread. I would gladly suffer dissatisfaction with myself in the
knowledge of my own imperfections, but in return I would demand
fame . . . real, resounding fame.
A seagull belongs by the sea where it can find its element, its necessary space,
its mate and breeding places. Life on a lake is calm and easy, but vulnerable
and unfulfilling. The lake is to the sea as Sorin's estate with its amateur
theatricals is to Moscow and the professional theatre.
Throughout the play lake and seagull continue to function as a pair of
symbols, and it is largely through its association with the lake that the seagull
symbol is integrated into the play, including that part of the play which is not
directly about Nina. The lake has a continuing and powerful presence. It is
part of the scenery of the first two acts and is continually referred to by the
characters. It is also the backdrop to Trepliov's futuristic fantasy.
Sorin's estate, the setting of the play, borders the lake. Life on that
estate is characterized by acute inertia and ennui:
Oh, what could be more boring than this cloying country boredom!
The sense of mornings stretching out interminably seeps into the interstices
of the futile philosophizing:
It must be about lunch time. . . .
My leg's gone to sleep.
Sorin himself is almost a caricature of a man who hasn't really lived, never
really experienced anything, and still, at sixty-two, wants to go on living in
the hope that even now, without any action or decision or change of routine
on his part, life will suddenly begin. "It's a little indecent" says Dorn. Dorn
himself is fifty-five and claims it is too late for him to change his way of life.
Masha, quite young, continues, despite her marriage, to pine for Trepliov.
For those who live on the estate there is nothing to do but fall in love
and no one to fall in love with but other members of the same closed circle,
not even the occupants of the neighbouring estates. In the old days you could
hear music and singing across the lake almost every night from the six
country houses around it; but the primary activities were shooting and love
affairs, both destructive. That the lake is now silent testifies to the decadence
of that country house life and puts a doom on Sorin's.
Sorin agrees with Trepliov that in two hundred thousand years there will
be "just nothing." In a sense there is "just nothing" already, nothing creative,
neither laughter nor real love nor children nor work. The lakeside society is
specifically a retreat from work. Trigorin says:
If I lived in a place like this, beside a lake, do you suppose I should ever
write anything? I should overcome this passion of mine and do nothing
but fish.
her wings and find her freedom, which is her vocation. In Act II we have the
dead seagull which Trigorin shallowly misinterprets as Nina destroyed by him,
but which really embodies the death of Trepliov's love and his premonition of
his own suicide. Nina survives her "destruction" by Trigorin because she
escapes the lake and finds her vocation. Trepliov does not survive his mother's
love. The contrast is underlined by the fact that the play contains an aspiring
actress and an established actress, an aspiring writer and an established writer.
In each case we are meant to feel, I think, that the younger generation has the
more genuine talent. But more than talent is needed in these circumstances.
Trepliov lacks the necessary strength. He is the seagull marooned on its
stagnant lake waiting to be shot.
Nina has the necessary strength. She appeals to Trigorin for help, but,
like Dorn with Masha, he declines to advise her. Nevertheless, she tries to
make her dream a reality:
I've decided irrevocably, the die is cast - I'm going on the stage. I shall
be gone from here tomorrow. I'm leaving my father, leaving everything,
I'm beginning a new life . . . I'm going to Moscow . . .
He pleads with Nina to stay with him, to "love and warm" him, to be a
mother-substitute. Nina will not be confined again and runs off through the
garden, leaving Trepliov worrying that Mamma might be upset if she hears of
Nina's visit.
As the rest of them sit down to cards, and Trigorin denies all knowledge
of the stuffed seagull, Trepliov shoots himself. Dorn, also anxious that
Mamma should not be upset, covers up, and feigns unconcern by humming:
Again I stand before you enchanted.
In most of Chehov's plays this "new and better life" is presented in a social
and historical context as the wonderful life of a hundred or two hundred
years hence for which we must now all work and sacrifice ourselves. Mr. Stein
is rightly sceptical about Chehov's naive social optimism. In the words of the
Four Quartets:
Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
repeated over and over. The players do not go on repeating them for ever
(except in the world of Samuel Beckett). After the third repeat the game is
abandoned and another begun. A stalemate in love need not be lived with for
a lifetime, trailing behind like a dress with an endless train. "One ought to
shake oneself and throw it all off," says Masha. Of course that is easier said
than done, but it is possible, as Nina shows.
Walter Stein might fairly have argued that my account of the play describes
Chehov's intention more adequately than his achievement.
Love without hope it only happens in novels. It's really nothing.
You've only got to keep a firm hold on yourself ... I'll forget it all...
tear it out of my heart roots and all.
But Masha's very refusal to assume a tragic pose testifies to the reality and
rootedness of what she tries to argue out of existence. Chehov's compassion
gets the better of him. He realises that in asking people "only" to keep a firm
hold on themselves, he may be asking much too much. And "going away,"
when he comes to apply the simple formula, ceases to carry much conviction.
If Trepliov had the strength to go away, he would not be Trepliov, he would
be someone else who would probably also have the strength to resist his
mother at home. Trepliov looks at himself and recognizes clearly enough his
neuroses. But they cannot be cast off like a black dress or washed off like
make-up. They are the pigment of the soul.
Arkadina claims to look younger than Masha:
because I work, I care about things, I'm always on the go, while you
stay in the same place all the time, you don't really live. . . .
In her mouth, the identification of living with working and moving about is
undercut as a serious proposition. We know that her youthfulness is in fact a
by-product of her selfishness, her inability to feel as deeply as Masha, Nina or
Trepliov. Trigorin also works, but his life adds up to very little. Sorin has
wasted his life in useful work.
At the end of Uncle Vanya too, work, faith and endurance are to be
offered by Sonya as the saving positives, and are supported still less by the
emotional logic of the play. In The Three Sisters there can no longer be any
doubt that neither work nor faith nor going to Moscow are anything more
than the desperate devices by which the instinctive need to live and love and
be happy strives to root itself in tragically unsustaining soil.
NOTES
1. Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, London, 1969, pp.
101-104.
2. All quotations are taken from the translation by Elisaveta Fen,
Penguin Books.
3. For an interesting discussion of the use of the lake and other symbols