44. The Seagull by Anton Chekhov

In 1892 Anton Chekhov was a success. He had two plays behind him (Ivanov and The Bear), and had published many of the short stories that, to the present writer's mind at least, constitute his greatest work. He was wealthy enough to buy a country estate for his family in the village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles from Moscow, and here he began to settle into the role of a country landowner - a role later mined for stories such as ‘New Villa’ and ‘My Wife’. He also took to shooting wild game for sport, à la Turgenev.

In the spring of 1892, Chekhov and a friend, Isaak Levitan, set out from Melikhovo for a day’s hunting. Neither was very experienced with guns. Levitan was actually a landscape painter, more interested in observing the scenery than shooting bits of it, and both were to some degree aware that they were play-acting. At one point Levitan, taking aim, downed a woodcock, and they both ran to find it. When they discovered its body in the grass they were disconcerted to find that it was still alive and staring up at them in mute agony. Levitan pleaded with Chekhov to finish it off. Chekhov refused, sickening of the whole business. Levitan persisted. Finally Chekhov, in disgust, smashed the woodcock’s head in with his rifle-butt. ‘And while two idiots went home and sat down to dinner,’ Chekhov wrote to his friend Alexei Suvorin on April 8 1892, ‘there was one beautiful, infatuated creature less in the world.’

Three years later Chekhov was writing the first of his major dramatic works. It was The Seagull. In the play, a loose colony of artists and malcontents live in a house by the shore of a lake, and seek ways to escape the boredom of their existence. An actress, Irina Arkadina, fears age; her son Kostya, a budding writer, is in love with Nina, a pretty neighbour; Nina loves Trigorin, a Hamlet-like writer who is obsessed with his sense of failure as an artist. At one point Kostya shoots a seagull and brings it into the house. Nina and Trigorin later notice it discarded on a table:

TRIGORIN: What’s this?
NINA: A seagull. Kostya killed it.
TRIGORIN: A fine bird. I don’t really want to leave here. Try to persuade Irina Arkadina to stay, eh? (Makes a note in his book.)
NINA: What are you writing?
TRIGORIN: Just a note or two. Had an idea for a story. (Puts the book away.) An idea for a short story: a young girl like you has been living all her life by a lake. She loves it like a seagull and is as free and happy as a seagull. Then a man happens to come along, sees her and destroys her just for the fun of it, like this seagull.

By the end of the play Nina has become pregnant by Trigorin but has lost her baby. Trigorin has deserted her. Kostya has committed suicide with the gun he used to kill the seagull. Everyone else has sunk further into the slough of despond.

It seems highly likely that Chekhov’s use of the wild bird — given a species-change for Coleridgeian resonance — and his disgust for anyone who destroys a life ‘just for the fun of it’ was linked to the woodcock incident.

There were many beautiful, infatuated creatures in Chekhov's life, and many that inspired his writings, but as far as we know this was the only one with feathers.

Consulted:
Hellman, Lillian, ed.: The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov (Hamish Hamilton, 1955)
Troyat, Henri: Chekhov (Macmillan, 1987)

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