Customer Reviews

The Sea Gull (Dover Thrift Editions)

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I still can never figure out why "The Cherry Orchard" is hailed as his masterpiece and put in all the Drama anthologies to represent his work. To me "Ivanov", "The Sea Gull" and "Uncle Vanya" are his great works. "The Sea Gull" however ranks on the top of my list as his best work. A tragic tale of the meaning of love and being an artist with comic tones and timeless characters. All of the emotions and situations are realistic to real life. The play is more personal and has more meaning than average Realism. The first time I saw "The Sea Gull" I fell in love with it so much I saw it the next day again. It's one of the rare four act plays that I can enjoy the whole performance and not be bored. Anyone who wants to see Chekhov's brilliance should read this play and the others I mentioned.

Inspired by a real-life incident of the death of a sea gull, this is hailed as the best written play by Chekov, The Sea Gull tells a poignant love story centered on literaray nonentity Konstantin's tragic quest for a burgeoning actress Nina. Swirling around the country estate are characters who reflect Konstantin's pain and suffering in their own harshly realistic ways. In this famed play, Chekov introduces a brand new form of literature as to emphasize characters other than plot. Instead of placing characters beneath a steady frame, Chekov lets his characters guide the subtle movement of the sad tale of devastated dreams and hopes. The dying sea gull symbolizes the emptiness of defeat and further stressing the beauty of life. The fullness of being simply alive comes beaming with power and touches life.

This is such a rich and deep work. Its exploration of human longings and relationships is powerfully poetic. One of its predominant notes is longing and disappointment in life. The Masha who opens the play telling of her unhappiness seems to signal what is to come, a series of lonely cries from characters each of whom fails to attain what they most want. The estate owner Sorin laments never having fulfilled his dream of being an author, or his dream of having been married, and now even his dream of living out his last years in the City, in Moscow. His sister the actress is in one sense a typically Russian character filled with passionate contradictions, generous in helping the misfortunate but unbelievably vain in regard to her own status as actress. Her son Constantine frustrated by the love of the actress Nina is too troubled by the sense of inferiority which comes from his having spent a childhood in the company of his mother's successful friends. Nina herself madly in love with the writer Trifonov with whom she runs off with, only to be abandoned by , is too another broken character who nonetheless persists and fights on, as she goes out to the provinces to renew her acting career. Fame and success too do not provide the key to happiness as is demonstrated in the life of Trifonov.
This play demonstrates Chekhov's incredible capacity for creating living characters, and the tremendous emotional richness of his work.
A masterpiece