SOURCE: Introduction to The Seagull: A Comedy in Four Acts, translated by Michael Frayn, Methuen, 1986, pp. ix-xx.

In the following essay, Frayn provides an overview of The Seagull, focusing on its initial spectacular failure in St. Petersburg and its equally spectacular success in Moscow a month later.

'A comedy—three f., six m., four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love.'

Chekhov's own synopsis of the play, in a letter to his friend Suvorin written a month before he finished it, is characteristically self-mocking and offhand. (His cast-list is even one f. short, unless he added the fourth woman only during that last month, or when he revised the play the following year). He says in the same letter that he is cheating against the conventions of the theatre, but no one could have begun to...