Nina: The beautiful young neighbor of Konstantin. She is infatuated with famous people such as Konstatin’s mother and the renowned novelist Boris Alexyvich Trigorin. She desires to become a famous actress in her own right.
What’s Tragic?
Nina represents the loss of innocence. She believes that Trigorin is a great and moral person simply because of his fame. Unfortunately, during the two years that pass between acts three and four, Nina has an affair with Trigorin. She becomes pregnant, the child dies, and Trigorin disregards her like a child grown bored with an old toy.
Nina works as an actress, but she is neither good nor successful. By the play’s end, she feels wretched and confused about herself. She begins referring to herself as “the seagull,” the innocent bird that was shot, killed, stuffed and mounted.
What’s funny?
At the play’s end, despite all of the emotional harm she has received, she loves Trigorin more than ever. Humor is generated from her terrible judge of character. How can she love a man that has stolen her innocence and caused so much pain? We can laugh – not out of amusement – but because we too were once (and perhaps still are) naïve.
Irina: A famous actress of the Russian stage. She is also the unappreciative mother of Konstantin.
What’s Tragic?
Irina does not understand or support her son’s writing career. Knowing that Konstantin is obsessed with breaking away from traditional drama and literature, she torments her son by quoting Shakespeare.
There are some parallels between Irina and Gertrude, the mother of Shakespeare’s greatest tragic character: Hamlet. Like Gertrude, Irina is in love with a man that her son abhors. Also, like Hamlet’s mother, Irina’s questionable morals provide the foundation of her son’s melancholy.
What’s Funny? Irina’s flaw is one found in many diva characters. She has an enormously inflated ego yet is terribly insecure. Here are some examples that showcase her incongruities:
- She brags about her steadfast youth and beauty yet begs Trigorin to stay in their relationship despite her old age.
- She flaunts her success but claims that she has no money to help her distressed son or her ailing brother.
- She loves her son yet maintains a romantic relationship which she knows tortures Konstantin’s soul.
Konstantin Treplev: A young, idealistic and often desperate writer who lives in the shadow of his famous mother.
What’s Tragic?
Fraught with emotional problems, Konstatin wants to be loved by Nina and his mother, but instead the female characters turn their affections toward Boris Trigorin.
Tortured by his unrequited love for Nina, and the ill-favored reception of his play, Konstantin shoots a seagull, a symbol of innocence and freedom. Shortly after, he attempts suicide. After Nina leaves for Moscow, Konstantin writes furiously and gradually gains success as an author.
Nevertheless, his approaching fame means little to him. So long as Nina and his mother choose Trigorin, Konstantin can never be content. And so, at the play’s end, he finally succeeds in taking his own life.
What’s Funny?
Because of the violent end of Konstantin’s life, it is difficult to view act four as a finale of a comedy. However, Konstantin can be viewed as a satire of the “new movement” of symbolist writers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Throughout most of the play, Konstantin is passionate about creating new artistic forms and abolishing old ones. However, by the play’s conclusion he decides that forms do not really matter. What is important is to “just keep writing.”
That epiphany sounds somewhat encouraging, yet by the end of act four he tears up his manuscripts and shoots himself. What makes him so miserable? Nina? His art? His mother? Trigorin? A mental disorder? All of the above?
Because his melancholy is so difficult to pin point, the audience may ultimately find Konstantin to be merely a sad fool, a far cry from his more philosophical literary counterpart, Hamlet.
In the last moment of this grim comedy, the audience knows that Konstantin is dead. We do not witness the extreme grief of the mother, or Masha, or Nina or anyone else. Instead, the curtain closes as they play cards, oblivious to tragedy.
Viciously funny stuff, don’t you agree?
