Who was Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)? Although he moved comfortably among the elite artists of his day Chekhov was born of peasant stock. His paternal grandfather had purchased his freedom and that of his family in 1840 only twenty years before the playwright’s birth; his father owned a small variety store in the port town of Taganrog on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov. When the business failed young Anton was left to make his way on his own after his family overwhelmed by debt fled to Moscow. Chekhov recounted his own biography as follows:

That which writers belonging to the upper class receive from nature for nothing plebeians
acquire at the cost of their youth. Write a story of how a young man the son of a serf
who has served in a shop sung in a choir been at a high school and a university who has
been brought up to respect everyone of higher rank and position to kiss priests’ hands
to reverence other people’s ideas to be thankful for every morsel of bread who has been
many times whipped … write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop
by drop and how waking one beautiful morning he feels that he has no longer a slave’s
blood in his veins but a real man’s …

Young Chekhov embraced life with gusto. He loved telling stories putting on plays playing tricks swimming hiking the woods and foraging for mushrooms. Growing up in a port town he delighted in the variety of goods in the shops and the colorful nationalities gathered at that bustling crossroad of fading empires. Throughout his short life (1860-1904) though plagued with illness he never rested. He earned a medical degree supervised the building of village schools tended for free the sick among the peasantry designed gardens and constructed houses for himself and family and even traveled to Sakhalin Island in Siberia to study prison conditions and advance a program for reform -- and all that while penning 300 stories and a dozen plays. His medical career he said was his wife; his writing his mistress. Like Dickens he was blessed with great talent and immense energy and rocketed to fame from no place at all.

The Seagull presents an ensemble of characters each highly marked by personal gestures speaking styles particular desires and personal histories. Chekhov individualizes his characters so we recognize them quickly and grasp their peculiarities. Still we conceive of them within a group.

Chekhov proposes an art of sociability where we grasp the whole while delighting in the parts.
He invites his audience to stand aloof above the drama and take in this weave of lives and fates caught unaware in history’s web. We are among comfortable land-owners drifting along in illusions.

They are a sorry lot pitiable but laughable inviting our amusement and at times our dread.
Chekhov asks us to hover above the action and look down upon it like gods bemused and indifferent.

“Life is tragedy when seen in close-up and comedy in long shot--according to Charlie
Chaplin. Some say tragedy is for those who feel and comedy for those who think. Another insists tragedy is linear and comedy full of surprises. The comic perspective confirms our suspicion that we neither know what we are about nor how to make sense of things. Chekhov tests our ability to get on without precise understandings. His characters cannot find their balance and Chekhov makes sure his audience cannot either.

Several of Chekhov’s remarks about art help us grasp what he is about. In a letter he writes of his struggle to work outside the bounds of genre conventions: I should have liked to have been a free artist and nothing more -- and I regret that God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms -- the most absolute freedom freedom from force and fraud in whatever form the two latter may be expressed that is the program I would hold to … He resists having his writing serve a cause -- he is neither conservative nor liberal when he writes and takes Tolstoy to task as in The Kreutzer Sonata for pressing his own ideas on his reader.