SOURCE: "Chekhov's 'Modern Classicism,'" in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 65, No. 1, January 1987, pp. 13-25.

In this essay, Peace uncovers elements of Greek classical tragedy in The Seagull and Three Sisters.

Chekhov's real career as a dramatist may be seen as having begun with The Seagull: it marks the onset of the truly Chekhovian theatre. In this play the young writer Treplev issues something in the nature of a manifesto with his denunciation of the conventional theatre of his day and the staging of his own play, designed to impress (and to reproach) his mother—a pillar of that theatre, and her lover—the established writer Trigorin.

It is tempting to see in Treplev's demands for new forms in the theatre a manifesto launched by Chekhov himself. Indeed his fellow writer Potapenko (whose own life, as we know, provided material for Chekhov's plot) records that at...