SOURCE: Sagar, Keith. “Chehov's Magic Lake: A Reading of The Seagull.” Modern Drama 15, no. 4 (March 1973): 441-47.

In the following essay, Sagar considers how seriously the seagull symbol should be taken in The Seagull.

In Modern Drama, (September, 1965) Dorothy U. Seyler suggests, in a most unconvincing article, that Chehov's seagull is a parody of Ibsen's wild duck. She tries to pass off Chehov's remark to A. L. Vishnevsky that Ibsen was his favourite author as a “family joke” by setting against it a number of Chehov's criticisms of Ibsen plays, including The Wild Duck. All these criticisms are of Ibsen's ideas, not his technique, except the reference to the white horses in Rosmersholm, which are certainly far less effective symbols and far less organic than the wild duck. There is every reason to believe that Chehov at that stage of his career would admire the way in which Ibsen...