The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [309]
What Chekhov introduces us to in Ivanov, veiled in that peculiar, sweet melancholy lit with flashes of mordant humour which hangs over his plays, is a little world not quite like anything seen in storytelling before. No one is presented as particularly dark: not even the heartless but self-despising Ivanov (although Chekhov's plays always feature one dominant personality, like Ivanov or Liuba in The Cherry Orchard, whose egotism casts a shadow over everyone else). But at the same time none of the other characters is particularly light either. All are essentially trapped in the same moral twilight. Each is isolated and shut off from everyone else, because they are all to a greater or lesser extent bound up in their own individual form of egotism. No longer is there any hint of that other dimension we have previously seen as so fundamental to the great archetypal stories: that life-giving force which can ultimately weld a story together by bringing light, recognition, transformation and wholeness. The values of the Self have all but vanished below the horizon. And without them, all that can happen - as we began to see developing in later Hardy - is that a story's characters are doomed to drift slowly downwards, like water draining away down a plughole, until finally may come that shocking event which shows the bath is empty. At least this gives the story the semblance of having come to a conclusion. But nothing has really been resolved or understood.
In Chekhov's next variation on the theme, The Seagull (1896), the dominant personality is Arkadina, the fading middle-aged actress, dreaming of the days when she was winning applause on the stage of the local provincial centre, Kharkhov. Behind theatrical shows of caring for others, she is wholly egocentric. Now she has come out to the family's country estate, accompanied by the successful but empty middle-aged writer Trigorin, where her son Trepliov has planned to put on a play in the garden, with Nina, the daughter of a neighbour. The nature of his dramatic fragment is telling. It conjures up a vision of the world 200,000 years into the future, when all the myriad forms of life on earth have become subsumed into a single World-Soul, opposed by the only other creature surviving in the universe, the Devil. Although presented as a kind of parody avant-garde play, this haunting image of a mysterious totality symbolising the spiritual unity of all life, and played by the innocent young Nina, is in fact the nearest thing to an evocation of the Self anywhere in Chekhov. But of course it is only an immature dream, set in some impossibly remote future. And such pretentious fantasy is all far too boring and `decadent' for the uncomprehending mother, provoking her to sarcastic interventions so crushing to the poor young author that he brings proceedings to an abrupt end.
Once the son's inability to escape the suffocating grip of the `Dark Mother' is established as the central problem, events then again gradually spiral down to a violent conclusion. In the wake of his humiliation over the play, Nina, who says she has been drawn to the household `like a seagull', loses interest in young Trepliov and gravitates instead to the famous writer Trigorin. Trepliov, deeply hurt, shoots a seagull and presents it to her. The heartless Trigorin, cocooned in his self-important persona as a great writer, jots down notes for a story which he tells her is about `a young girl like you' who is `happy and free as a seagull. But a man chances to come along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her, just like this seagull here.' Nina's crush on Trigorin develops to the point where she refers him to a line in one of his own books: `if you ever need my life, come and take it. Trepliov and his mother have a row, in which he expresses utter contempt for