The Seagull

you and you are smiling already, your eyes are melting in its rays. I won’t be in your way goes off quickly. Trigorin Making notes in his book. Takes snuff and drinks vodka. Always in black. The schoolmaster is in love with her.⁠ ⁠… Nina Good morning, Boris Alexeyevitch! Trigorin Good morning. Circumstances have turned out so unexpectedly that it seems we are setting off today. We are hardly likely to meet again. I am sorry. I don’t often have the chance of meeting young girls, youthful and charming; I have forgotten how one feels at eighteen or nineteen and can’t picture it to myself, and so the young girls in my stories and novels are usually false. I should like to be in your shoes just for one hour to find out how you think, and altogether what sort of person you are. Nina And I should like to be in your shoes. Trigorin What for? Nina To know what it feels like to be a famous, gifted author. What does it feel like to be famous? How does it affect you, being famous? Trigorin How? Nohow, I believe. I have never thought about it. After a moment’s thought. It’s one of two things: either you exaggerate my fame, or it never is felt at all. Nina But if you read about yourself in the newspapers? Trigorin When they praise me I am pleased, and when they abuse me I feel out of humour for a day or two. Nina What a wonderful world! If only you knew how I envy you! How different people’s lots in life are! Some can scarcely get through their dull, obscure existence, they are all just like one another, they are all unhappy; while others⁠—you, for instance⁠—you are one out of a million, have an interesting life full of brightness and significance. You are happy. Trigorin I? Shrugging his shoulders. Hm.⁠ ⁠… You talk of fame and happiness, of bright interesting life, but to me all those fine words, if you will forgive my saying so, are just like a sweetmeat which I never taste. You are very young and very good-natured. Nina Your life is splendid! Trigorin What is there particularly nice in it? Looks at his watch. I must go and write directly. Excuse me, I mustn’t stay⁠ ⁠… laughs. You have stepped on my favourite corn, as the saying is, and here I am beginning to get excited and a little cross. Let us talk though. We will talk about my splendid bright life.⁠ ⁠… Well, where shall we begin? After thinking a little. There are such things as fixed ideas, when a man thinks day and night for instance, of nothing but the moon. And I have just such a moon. I am haunted day and night by one persistent thought: I ought to be writing, I ought to be writing, I ought⁠ ⁠… I have scarcely finished one novel when, for some reason, I must begin writing another, then a third, after the third a fourth. I write incessantly, post haste, and I can’t write in any other way. What is there splendid and bright in that, I ask you? Oh, it’s an absurd life! Here I am with you; I am excited, yet every moment I remember that my unfinished novel is waiting for me. Here I see a cloud that looks like a grand piano. I think that I must put into a story somewhere that a cloud sailed by that looked like a grand piano. There is a scent of heliotrope. I hurriedly make a note: a sickly smell, a widow’s flower, to be mentioned in the description of a summer evening. I catch up myself and you at every sentence, every word, and make haste to put those sentences and words away into my literary treasure-house⁠—it may come in useful! When I finish work I race off to the theatre or to fishing; if only I could rest in that and forget myself. But no, there’s a new subject rolling about in my head like a heavy iron cannon ball, and I am drawn to my writing table and must make haste again to go on writing and writing. And it’s always like that, always. And I have no rest from myself, and I feel that I am eating up my own life, and that for the sake of the honey I give to someone in space I am stripping the pollen from my best flowers, tearing up the flowers themselves and trampling on their roots. Don’t you think I am mad? Do my friends and acquaintances treat me as though I were sane? “What are you writing? What are you giving us?” It’s the same thing again and again, and it seems to me as though my friends’ notice, their praises, their enthusiasm⁠—that it’s all a sham, that they are deceiving me as an invalid and I am somehow afraid that they will steal up to me from behind, snatch me and carry me off and put me in a madhouse. And in those years, the best years of my youth, when I was beginning, my writing was unmixed torture. A small writer, particularly when he is not successful, seems to himself clumsy, awkward, unnecessary; his nerves are strained and overwrought. He can’t resist hanging about people connected with literature and art, unrecognised and unnoticed by anyone, afraid to look anyone boldly in the face, like a passionate gambler without any money. I hadn’t seen my reader, but for some reason I always imagined him hostile, and mistrustful. I was afraid of the public, it alarmed me, and when I had to produce my first play it always seemed to me that all the dark people felt hostile and all the fair ones were coldly indifferent. Oh, how awful it was! What agony it was! Nina But surely inspiration and the very process of creation give you moments of exalted happiness? Trigorin Yes. While I am writing I enjoy it. And I like reading my proofs,