The Seagull
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“Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English.” —James Wood, New Yorker The Seagull , in this new translation for TCG’s Russian Drama Series, includes lines and variants found in Chekhov’s final version of the play, but omitted from the script for the original performance at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, which went on to become the standard printed version. The restored text, a product of the continuing collaboration of playwright Richard Nelson and translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, provides valuable insight into Chekhov’s intentions in his groundbreaking play. Richard Nelson ’s many plays include The Apple Family: Scenes from Life in the Country (That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, Sorry, Regular Singing); The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family (Hungry, What Did You Expect?, Women of a Certain Age); Nikolai and the Others; Goodnight Children Everywhere (Olivier Award for Best Play); Franny’s Way; Some Americans Abroad; Frank’s Home; Two Shakespearean Actors and James Joyce’s The Dead (with Shaun Davey; Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical). Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated the works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov. Their translations of The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina won the PEN Translation Prize in 1991 and 2002, respectively. Pevear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, are married and live in France.
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ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
The Cherry Orchard
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Chekhov’s practice of “violating the conventions of the stage” puzzled Tolstoy, who once asked him about Uncle Vanya: “What’s it all about? Where’s the drama?” In fact, the subtitle of The Seagull, “A Comedy in Four Acts,” already begs the question. It is certainly not a comedy in any conventional sense. Calling it a comedy may have been something of a provocation on Chekhov’s part, aimed at directors and actors. He wanted a different manner of playing than in the melodramas of the day; he wanted it to be light and quick; he wanted an internal shifting of tones rather than a single overarching effect. Comedy flashes repeatedly in the exchanges between his characters, and disappears again. The aim is not laughter per se. It is also not satire, though there are sharply satirical moments in the play. It is a serious comedy of human contradictions.
There is no central idea in The Seagull, nor in any of Chekhov’s last plays; there is no social message, no final revelation, apparently no unifying vision. Separate people go their separate ways. They seem to walk past each other and talk past each other; they keep repeating the same words, harping on the same obsessions. “One of Chekhov’s most important innovations,” Harvey Pitcher wrote in The Chekhov Play, “was to decentralize his cast. The traditional idea of hero and heroine has been discarded. No single character is allowed to stand out as more central than any other . . .”¶ This quality of Chekhov’s dramaturgy happened to suit the notions of the new Moscow Art Theatre, with its stress on the ensemble over individual stars (in Stanislavsky’s famous phrase, “There are no small parts, only small actors”). But for Chekhov it was not simply a technical innovation. Here is Sorin’s country estate with its view of the lake; and here is this odd conglomeration of people, with their disagreements about literature and theater, with their “five tons of love”—a love that separates them more than it unites them. Their active lives are over (Sorin, Dorn), or not yet begun (Treplyov, Nina), or go on elsewhere (Arkadina, Trigorin). There is indeed “little action” in the play itself. The few dramatic events happen offstage. What unites the characters is not their involvement in a well-constructed plot; it is their happening to be together in a place suspended in time. There is no hierarchy among them; they are one in their exposed humanity. Chekhov’s portrayal of them is both humorous and pitiless.
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