SOURCE: Reid, John. “Matter and Spirit in The Seagull.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 607-22.

In the following essay, Reid discusses the nature of the symbolism Chekhov used in The Seagull and the influence of the mystic Vladimir Solovyov on the author.

Our time must be defined by two opposing features—it is a time of extreme materialism and, at the same time, of the most passionate idealistic outbursts of spirit. We are present at a great, significant struggle of two views of life, two diametrically opposed world views.

—Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1892)¹

[T]he materialistic movement is not a school or tendency in the narrow journalistic sense; it is not something passing or accidental; it is necessary, inevitable and beyond the power of man. … Outside matter there is neither knowledge nor experience, and consequently there is no truth.

—Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889.²

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