SOURCE: "The Seagull: Art and Love, Love and Art," in Chekhov's Plays: An Opening into Eternity, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 70-100.

In the essay below, which was first published in 1992, Gilman asserts: "The Seagull is about art and love not so much in the sense that they are its topics but in the sense that the entire play quite literally surrounds them, providing those abstractions with the dramatic context or field in which they can come to life, working themselves out as motifs."

Some preliminary notes, ideas, observations, questions, and reminders for an essay on the play.

Its title is the most nearly symbolic of those for any Chekhov play but, like its closest rival, The Cherry Orchard's trees, the bird isn't symbolic in any pseudopoetic or culturally anxious way.

The Russian word for the title, chaika, is used for both "gull," the genus, and the particular species...