ARTicles vol. 7 i. 3: Symbolism, Melodrama, and Love

As The Seagull opens, the audience hears hammers pounding away. Workmen are busy erecting a small stage on a country estate in Russia. Full of anticipation, Konstantin awaits the first performance of the drama he has written for his beloved Nina. He also hopes to impress his mother with his artistic genius. This play-within-a-play, and the characters’ reactions to it, propels The Seagull and ushered in a new era of theatre.

Konstantin’s play flaunts all the motifs of fin-de-siècle Symbolism, a literary movement initiated by French poet and critic Baudelaire. Renouncing direct statement, Symbolism used metaphors to suggest an ideal world. Mallarmé and Maeterlinck launched Symbolism in the theatre, replacing plots with mysterious atmospheres. A reaction against Realism, Symbolism turned its back on the traditions of the past. As Konstantin says, “We need new forms, and if we can’t have them, then we’re better off with no theatre at all.”

While Chekhov might agree with Konstantin’s sentiment, how we should respond to his Symbolist stage poem is not clear. One could scorn the play, as Konstantin’s audience does. His mother Arkadina, the tempestuous actress of Russian melodramas, derides it as decadent; Trigorin, her lover, is perplexed; even Nina protests that there are no real characters. Given the importance of the Symbolist movement, however, to dismiss the play as juvenile doodling might be unfair.

One sees the influence of Symbolism in Chekhov’s mature work from the central motif of the seagull to the prominence of the cherry orchard. After completing The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov conceived of a play he did not have time to write about arctic explorers with a ghost and a ship crushed by polar ice onstage. These fragments suggest that Chekhov was moving toward Symbolist drama, as did Ibsen and Strindberg in their final plays: the three great pillars of Realism were all pushing against its limits.

For the past hundred years critics have argued about the value of Konstantin’s play. Most believe that Chekhov was mocking the Symbolist movement. Others suggest that the play is a significant contribution to modern playwriting. Considering that Chekhov admired Symbolism yet mocked it through Konstantin’s audience, perhaps his attitude toward the movement was ambivalent. Thus the play-within-a-play might be seen as both an homage to and a parody of a literary movement that had transformed European culture.

This paradox in Chekhov’s work goes a long way toward explaining how revolutionary The Seagull is. Could Chekhov be parodying himself in Konstantin? Just as Konstantin attempts to discover new forms in the theatre, so too was Chekhov searching for a new style in The Seagull. Chekhov used many of the conventions of Russian melodrama that had preceded him, mocking them yet milking them. He admitted in a letter to his friend Suvorin that he had written a play that went “contrary to all the rules of dramatic art.”

The majority of popular dramas – melodramas – were constructed around a number of clichés, usually love triangles. Chekhov does the same in the first act of The Seagull by establishing four different but intertwined love triangles. Critics often attack Chekhov for the melodramatic nature of such a device. This, however, is his point. In creating so many love triangles, the playwright highlights their absurdity and at the same time their irresistible appeal. The audience never tires of sexual imbroglios.

A similar device is used to mock the notion of the hero – integral to any well-made melodrama. Chekhov takes the focus off a single protagonist and makes it difficult to empathize fully with one person. He mocks the characters we try to sympathize with by emphasizing their shortcomings: Konstantin for his artistic pretences, Nina for her blind pursuit of a man she takes for a genius, and Arkadina for the acting tradition she defends. Chekhov elicits contradictory emotions from the audience.

Although Chekhov used stock characters from melodrama, he made them infinitely more complex. He proudly proclaimed that he had refused to introduce “a single villain nor an angel”; he “accused nobody, justified nobody.” On the surface Konstantin is the angst-ridden artist, but his anger is deep-rooted. His jealousy toward the more successful Trigorin and his insecurities about his mother’s liaison with a younger man are deeply touching. All of Chekhov’s characters have specific gravity: no stereotypes, no villains, no heroes. Every character is flawed.

Finally, when Konstantin succumbs to the tell-tale sign of melodrama – suicide – this gesture occurs offstage. Depriving the audience of the pleasure of this obligatory scene was seen as heresy on Chekhov’s part – to have a suicide but not let the audience see it! Chekhov emerges as a writer full of irony – at once willing to mock yet exploit the traditions of melodrama.

The fundamental changes that Chekhov brought to modern drama did not go unnoticed in his time. Chekhov understood the paradoxical nature of art; the discovery of radical new forms comes at the risk of alienating the audience. Just as Konstantin’s avant-garde play is a failure that pushes him further from his mother, so too the first performance of The Seagull at the Alexandrinski Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1896 was a catastrophe that forced Chekhov into isolation.

Accounts of the opening night differ, but everyone agrees it was disastrous. The actors were ill-prepared. Lines were forgotten, mistakes made. This, however, is only half the story. Actors and directors were not accustomed to Chekhov’s innovative method of writing. Thus his play was misunderstood and treated in the same way as any other melodrama. The audience was unforgiving; shouting harsh comments, they threw objects at the actors. The play ran for just three performances. Chekhov, like Konstantin, was devastated; he snuck out halfway through. He vowed never to write again for the stage.

Fortunately Nemirovich-Danchenko, the co-Artistic Director of the newly formed Moscow Art Theatre, begged Chekhov to reconsider. He wrote a number of times pleading to have The Seagull performed in his theatre’s inaugural season. Nemirovich-Danchenko understood the complexities of the piece, just as his colleague Stanislavski knew how to bring it to life with new acting and staging techniques. Chekhov eventually agreed, and the play was performed once again in 1898. In the right hands the play triumphed as impressively in Moscow as it had failed in St. Petersburg. Its success has become mythically enshrined with the formation of the Moscow Art Theatre, perhaps the most famous stage in the world.

The Seagull, like Konstantin’s play, is about the pursuit of new forms – forms that expand the boundaries of what theatre can do. It waits to be seen how János Szász, a visionary director known for dusting off classics, can extend for us what Chekhov and Stanislavski did for their audience.

Paul Stacey is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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