SOURCE: "Ephebes and Precursors in Chekhov's The Seagull:" in Slavic Review, Vol. 44, No. 3, Fall 1985, pp. 423-37.

In the essay below, Curtis offers a psychoanalytic reading of The Seagull, in which he argues that the play "represents a successful working through of Chekhov's anxiety of influence" from Turgenev and Shakespeare.

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence takes the Freudian concept of an oedipal relationship between father and son as a model for the relationship that exists when one artist, the father figure (or precursor, as Bloom calls him), influences another artist (the ephebe, in Bloom's terminology). Bloom's work provides a desirable redefinition of standard treatments of influence and stylistic change in that it offers a dynamic, rather than a static, paradigm, and denies any simplistic dissociation of the artist as historical figure from the poet as poet. Furthermore, it denies that literary influences can occur as purely verbal processes...