THE SEAGULL
A monologue from the
play by Anton
Chekhov
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NOTE: This monologue is reprinted
from Two Plays of Tchekhof. Trans. George Calderon. London:
Grant Richards Ltd., 1912. |
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TREPLEF: She is vexed at the idea of Nina Zarétchnaya
and not herself having a success even in this poor little theatre.
She is a psychological curiosity, my mother. A clever and gifted
woman, who can cry over a novel, will reel you off all Nekrásof's
poems by heart, and is the perfection of a sick nurse; but venture
to praise Eleonora Duse before her! Oho! ho! You must praise
nobody but her, write about her, shout about her, and go into
ecstasies over her wonderful performance in La Dame aux Camélias,
or The Fumes of Life; but as she cannot have these intoxicating
pleasures down here in the country, she's bored and gets spiteful;
we are her enemies, she thinks; it's all our fault. Then, she's
superstitious, is afraid of the number thirteen, or three candles
on a table. She's a miser, too. She has seven thousand pounds
in the bank at Odessa; I know it for certain. But ask her to
lend you anything and she'll cry. [Pulling the petals from
a flower] She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she
loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not. [Laughs]
You see, my mother doesn't love me. Why should she? She wants
to live, to love, to wear pretty frocks; and I, I am twenty-five
years old, and a perpetual reminder that she is no longer young.
When I'm not there, she is only thirty-two; when I am, she's
forty-three, and she hates me for that. She also knows that I
don't believe in the stage. She loves the stage; she thinks that
she is advancing the cause of humanity and her sacred art; but
I regard the stage of to-day as mere routine and prejudice. When
the curtain goes up and the gifted beings, the high priests of
the sacred art, appear by electric light, in a room with three
sides to it, representing how people eat, drink, love, walk and
wear their jackets; when they strive to squeeze out a moral from
the flat, vulgar pictures and the flat, vulgar phrases, a little
tiny moral, easy to comprehend and handy for home consumption,
when in a thousand variations they offer me always the same thing
over and over again--then I take to my heels and run, as Maupassant
ran from the Eiffel Tower, which crushed his brain by its overwhelming
vulgarity. We must have a new formula. That's what we want. And
if there are none, then it's better to have nothing at
all. I love my mother, I love her dearly; but it's a tomfool
life that she leads with this novelist always at her elbow, and
her name for ever in the papers--it disgusts me! Sometimes it
is just the egoism of the ordinary man that speaks to me; I am
sorry that I have a famous actress for my mother, and I feel
that if she had been an ordinary woman I should have been happier.
What position could be more hopeless and absurd than mine was
at home with her? Her drawing-room filled with nothing but celebrities,
actors and writers, and among them all the only nobody, myself,
tolerated only because I was her son. Who am I? What am I? Sent
down from the University without a degree through circumstances
for which the editor cannot hold himself responsible, as they
say; with no talents, without a farthing, and according to my
passport a Kief artisan; for my father was officially reckoned
Kief artisan, although he was a famous actor. So that when these
actors and writers in her drawing-room graciously bestowed their
attention on me, it seemed to me that they were merely taking
the measure of my insignificance; I guessed their thoughts and
felt humiliation.
MORE
MONOLOGUES BY ANTON CHEKHOV |
