The Seagull
By: Anton Chekhov
Andi
Becca
Jonathan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxr
xeIeN-2A&feature=related
Plot

A love octagon between characters

Arkadina, a successful and famous actress, is
spending the summer on her brother Sorin's
country estate, accompanied by her
younger lover, a successful and famous
novelist, Trigorin.

Her son, Konstantin, himself an aspiring writer,
has written a play which is to be performed
by Nina, daughter of a neighbouring
landowner, with whom he is rapturously in
love. The performance mystifies the
spectators and Konstantin is enraged by the
frivolous attitude of his mother.

Masha, the daughter of the estate steward,
Shamrayev, is secretly in love with Konstantin,
but she in turn is loved by Medvedenko, the
village schoolteacher. She confesses her
feelings to Doctor Dorn, who himself has
secretly been the lover of her mother, Polina.

Nina's feeling for Trigorin changes from
admiration to adoration. Konstantin,
anguished by the withdrawal of Nina's
feeling for him attempts to commit suicide.
Trigorin reciprocates Nina's passion, and she
decides to go to Moscow to become a
professional actress. She and Trigori arrange
to meet there. The visitors leave.

Two years pass. Everyone is back at the
estate. Konstantin has achieved some of his
literary ambitions. Masha and Medvedenko
are married. Trigorin has resumed his
relationship with Arkadina, having ended his
affair with Nina, who is now a struggling
actress touring the provinces. Nina returns
briefly to the neighbourhood, and while the
others are at supper, Nina and Konstantin
meet again.

In The Seagull, a work that the author himself
claimed contained ‘‘five tons of love,’’ is a
play about a very human tendency to reject
love that is freely given and seek it where it is
withheld
Theme: Love and Artists
Unrequited Love

Chekhov does not simply write about
artists and love, he creates the
embodiment of art and love on stage.
Through his characters' particular
personalities, Chekhov portrays the
various manners of being an artist and
particularly, an artist in love. All four
protagonists are artists in love. Arkadina,
Trigorin, Treplev, and Nina have divergent
relationships with their craft and their
lovers. Arkadina and Nina romanticize
acting, placing it on a pedestal higher
than the everyday affairs of life. Arkadina
places herself on this same pedestal
using her identity as an actress to excuse
her vanity. Nina exalts acting as well, but,
contrary to Arkadina, she endows acting
with nobility, sacrifice, and privilege. In
writing, Treplev compulsively paralyzes
himself in the pursuit of perfection, while
Trigorin obsessively gathers details from
his life and the lives around him for his
work without allowing the work to affect
his life.

Ironically, unrequited love is the structural
glue that sticks most of the characters in
The Seagull together. Medvedenko loves
Masha, but Masha loves Treplev. Treplev
does not love Masha back, he loves
Nina. Nina loves Treplev briefly but then
falls madly in love with Trigorin. Arkadina
loves Trigorin but loses his affections to
Nina. Paulina loves Dorn though she is
married to Shamrayev. Dorn sometimes
shares an affection for Paulina, but his
apathy for her appears to have begun
before the play started and continues to
fade during the course of the play. The
couples and the unrequited lovers
resonate and reflect off of one another,
serving as parallels and mirrors of each
other in the play. They represent different
stages of life and of love. The clearest
parallel involves Paulina and Masha.
Masha's unrequited love for Treplev and
decision to marry Medvedenko seems to
mirror her mother's unhappy marriage to
Shamrayev and her unrequited love for
Dorn.
Anton
Chekhov
• born on 29 January 1860 in
Taganrog, a port on the Sea of
Azov in southern Russia
• the third of six surviving
children
• A director of the parish choir,
devout Orthodox Christian,
and physically abusive father,
Pavel Chekhov has been seen
by some historians as the
model for his son's many
portraits of hypocrisy.
His Life

• mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller who entertained the
children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia
• "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov remembered, "but our soul
from our mother."
• attended a school for Greek boys, followed by the Taganrog gymnasium,
now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium, where he was kept down for a year
at fifteen for failing a Greek exam
• In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after over-extending his
finances building a new house,[18] and to avoid the debtor's prison fled to
Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending
the university
• The family lived in poverty in Moscow
• Chekhov was left behind to sell the family possessions and finish his
education.
• remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man called
Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the
family for the price of their house
• Worked at many papers in order to support his family and pay his way
through medical school
• In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician,
• Ended up getting tuburculosis
• In America, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through
the influence of Stanislavski's system of acting, with its notion of subtext:
Broadway.com
http://www.broadway.com/Spotlight-On-TheSeagull/broadway_video/5012559
NY Times Overview
 Ben Brantley
- Chief theater critic
- Sophisticated style
 Peter Marks
- Concise
- Humorous
Intros
Allusions
- Mathematics:
- Biology:
Humorous Criticism
 Marks
 Brantley
Structure
 Marks
 Brantley