The Seagull

business it is! I have never done as I liked in the country. In old days I used to get leave for twenty-eight days and come here for a rest and so on, but they worried me so with all sorts of trifles that before I had been here two days I was longing to be off again laughs. I’ve always been glad to get away from here.⁠ ⁠… But now I am on the retired list, and I have nowhere else to go, as a matter of fact. I’ve got to live here whether I like it or not.⁠ ⁠… Yakov To Treplev. We are going to have a bathe, Konstantin Gavrilitch. Treplev Very well; but don’t be more than ten minutes looks at his watch. It will soon begin. Yakov Yes, sir goes out. Treplev Looking round the stage. Here is our theatre. The curtain, then the first wing, then the second, and beyond that⁠—open space. No scenery of any sort. There is an open view of the lake and the horizon. We shall raise the curtain at exactly half-past eight, when the moon rises. Sorin Magnificent. Treplev If Nina is late it will spoil the whole effect. It is time she was here. Her father and her stepmother keep a sharp eye on her, and it is as hard for her to get out of the house as to escape from prison puts his uncle’s cravat straight. Your hair and your beard are very untidy. They want clipping or something.⁠ ⁠… Sorin Combing out his beard. It’s the tragedy of my life. Even as a young man I looked as though I had been drinking for days or something of the sort. I was never a favourite with the ladies sitting down. Why is your mother out of humour? Treplev Why? Because she is bored sitting down beside him. She is jealous. She is set against me, and against the performance, and against my play because Nina is acting in it, and she is not. She does not know my play, but she hates it. Sorin Laughs. What an idea! Treplev She is annoyed to think that even on this little stage Nina will have a triumph and not she looks at his watch. My mother is a psychological freak. Unmistakably talented, intelligent, capable of sobbing over a book, she will reel off all Nekrassov by heart; as a sick nurse she is an angel; but just try praising Duse in her presence! O‑ho! You must praise no one but herself, you must write about her, make a fuss over her, be in raptures over her extraordinary acting in La Dame aux Camélias or the Ferment of Life; but she has none of this narcotic in the country, she is bored and cross, and we are all her enemies⁠—we are all in fault. Then she is superstitious⁠—she is afraid of three candles, of the number thirteen. She is stingy. She has got seventy thousand roubles in a bank at Odessa⁠—I know that for a fact⁠—but ask her to lend you some money, and she will burst into tears. Sorin You imagine your mother does not like your play, and you are already upset and all that. Don’t worry; your mother adores you. Treplev Pulling the petals off a flower. Loves me, loves me not; loves me, loves me not; loves me, loves me not laughs. You see, my mother does not love me. I should think not! She wants to live, to love, to wear light blouses; and I am twenty-five, and I am a continual reminder that she is no longer young. When I am not there she is only thirty-two, but when I am there she is forty-three, and for that she hates me. She knows, too, that I have no belief in the theatre. She loves the stage, she fancies she is working for humanity, for the holy cause of art, while to my mind the modern theatre is nothing but tradition and conventionality. When the curtain goes up, and by artificial light, in a room with three walls, these great geniuses, the devotees of holy art, represent how people eat, drink, love, move about, and wear their jackets; when from these commonplace sentences and pictures they try to draw a moral⁠—a petty moral, easy of comprehension and convenient for domestic use; when in a thousand variations I am offered the same thing over and over again⁠—I run away as Maupassant ran away from the Eiffel Tower which weighed upon his brain with its vulgarity. Sorin You can’t do without the stage. Treplev We need new forms of expression. We need new forms, and if we can’t have them we had better have nothing looks at his watch. I love my mother⁠—I love her very much⁠—but she leads a senseless sort of life, always taken up with this literary gentleman, her name is always trotted out in the papers⁠—and that wearies me. And sometimes the simple egoism of an ordinary mortal makes me feel sorry that my mother is a celebrated actress, and I fancy that if she were an ordinary woman I should be happier. Uncle, what could be more hopeless and stupid than my position? She used to have visitors, all celebrities⁠—artists and authors⁠—and among them all I was the only one who was nothing, and they only put up with me because I was her son. Who am I? What am I? I left the University in my third year⁠—owing to circumstances “for which we accept no responsibility,” as the editors say; I have no talents, I haven’t a penny of my own, and on my passport I am described as an artisan of Kiev. You know my father was an artisan of Kiev, though he too was a well-known actor. So, when in her drawing-room all these artists and authors graciously noticed me, I always fancied from their faces that they were taking the measure of my insignificance⁠—I