The role of the writer in The Seagull

by Dilshan Boange

Recently I had the opportunity of watching a production of the Russian master playwright Anton Chekov’s The Seagull as a Sinhala translation by the title Muhudu Lihiniya directed by Sampath Perera. The play went on the boards at the Tower Hall on December 17, 2014. It was performed by a cast of young amateur actors who displayed a remarkable level of talent and show great promise as thespians.

It came to my knowledge subsequently that the play The Seagull is amongst the prescribed primary texts in the present English Literature syllabus for the GCE Advanced Level examination. Upon coming to know of this I felt that I could provide a commentary on a particular theme that I hope will be of some value to readers who take an interest in the play of Chekov, especially perhaps in this case students and young teachers of English literature who engage with the text of The Seagull.

The theme I would like to discuss as a critical commentary is that of the aspect of writers and how the role of the writer has been portrayed in The Seagull.

However, I must admit that I do not claim that what I offer in this article is an exhaustive analysis of that theme. My intention is to provide hopefully some useful key points to understand the significance of the theme via certain characters.

Theme

The characters who are connected to the theme of writers and their role in the story are – Kostia Treplev, Piotr Sorin and Boris Trigorin. They represent three very different layers to the theme. Firstly, there is Sorin who is aged and kind to his nephew whose artistic ambitions he applauds.

Sorin is a symbol of the ageing and vanishing class of educated provincial landowners in tsarist Russia as it drew closer to what became the overturning of the system through the Soviet revolution.

Sorin says very openly that he too dreamt to be a writer but could never achieve it. He therefore represents a generation and segment of tsarist Russian society that couldn’t make their aspirations come true optimally as they envisioned in their youth.

But one of the questions that may be asked about the character of Sorin is whether he had any specific reason to want to become a writer?

What was the goal he hoped to achieve? The answer may be hinted at through what he says to his nephew in the opening scene. When Kostia says to his uncle about his mother’s lover –the writer Trigorin, that he is a writer who is not in the league of the great Russian writers such as Pushkin or Turgenev but nevertheless read and appreciated, Sorin says that being even a small time writer is something of a glory or accomplishment that wins the respect of people. Perhaps the reason Sorin never managed to become a writer was that he didn’t have sufficient specific objectives to achieve through writing alone.

Adornment

We must keep in mind that he is a former civil servant who had a long and illustrious career. Therefore, perhaps becoming a writer would have meant as most to him as an added credential to his name. An adornment to his name that would make him part of society’s cultural elite. Those could have been Sorin’s reasons to dream of becoming a writer.

Boris Trigorin is a character who presents a notable amount of duplicity through his role in the story. He is opportunistic and exploitative.

He uses his status as a writer to further his social goals and ambitions. The way he charms and uses Irina Arkadina and Nina Zarechnaya is evidence of his insincere ways.

And through gauging naive young Nina he draws material for future works. It is in a way an admission of his limits of what he knows about people and their world of emotions.

However, he constructs beautiful imagery through words which beguile women such as Irina and Nina.

To Trigorin, being a writer is his means of survival; which is both financial and social survival. Therefore, one may ask how much of his own personal life experiences actually form the basis of his work? In contrast to the approach to writing and the purpose of being a writer which is shown by Trigorin’s character, Kosita who becomes a writer to the end of the play shows a stark difference.

Tormented

Kostia is a bitterly anguished young man who is tormented by many things as being neglected by his mother, not being appreciated as an artist, feeling underrated in his talents and being financially not stable.

When we see towards the end of the play that Kostia has become a writer there is in him a very staid and serious nature in his demeanour and he is very purpose driven in his writing.

He immerses himself in his writing in a way that shows a commitment to being a writer that surpasses what Trigorin presents through his character as a writer.

And one of the key elements that give us insight as an to what has made Kostia a committed writer, develops when Nina comes back towards the end of the play and Kostia reveals to her that her desertion of him left him utterly lonesome and anguished and that it was through his writing that he hoped to lessen his pain of losing her love.

In effect it was his bitter life experiences of his love for Nina and losing it that gave him his spirit as a writer. Kostia’s anguish and suffering, his longing for Nina is what becomes his inspiration or the fount of his work as a writer.

In this respect one can suggest that Kostia’s expressions are outpourings from his heart and his actual feelings while Trigorin constructs his writings from what he gathers from various sources and pieces together captivating wordings. Chekhov perhaps wanted to build in his play a premise by which the role and purpose of the writer as an artistic figure in the eyes of society could be viewed through drama.

And the three male figures –Sorin, Trigorin and Kostia represent this theme within the story and offer an interesting aspect in the play to investigate the role and image of the writer in Russian society as seen by Anton Chekhov.