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The Seagull ▾
contents
  1. Characters in the Play
  2. Act I
  3. Act II
  4. Act III
  5. Act IV
English ▾

The Seagull

Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett

free · 19,162 words · ~1 h read · first published 1896

text from Standard Ebooks

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Characters in the Play

  • Irina Nikolayevna Arkadin (Madame Treplev) (an actress)

  • Konstantin Gavrilovitch Treplev (her son, a young man)

  • Pyotr Nikolayevitch Sorin (her brother)

  • Nina Mihailovna Zaretchny (a young girl, the daughter of a wealthy landowner)

  • Ilya Afanasyevitch Shamraev (a retired lieutenant, Sorin’s steward)

  • Polina Andreyevna (his wife)

  • Masha (his daughter)

  • Boris Alexeyevitch Trigorin (a literary man)

  • Yevgeny Sergeyevitch Dorn (a doctor)

  • Semyon Semyonovitch Medvedenko (a schoolmaster)

  • Yakov (a labourer)

  • A Man Cook

  • A Housemaid

The action takes place in Sorin’s house and garden. Between the Third and the Fourth Acts there is an interval of two years.

Act I

Part of the park on Sorin’s estate. Wide avenue leading away from the spectators into the depths of the park towards the lake is blocked up by a platform roughly put together for private theatricals, so that the lake is not visible. To right and left of the platform, bushes. A few chairs, a little table.

restoring your place…

fetching the rest…

More by Anton Chekhov

  • Short Fiction
    Nothing much happens and somehow everything does. A woman with a little dog at a seaside resort, a man realizing his life went wrong over gooseberries.
  • The Cherry Orchard
    You spend time with the tender, maddening Ranevskaya and the newly wealthy Lopakhin, as everyone talks around the fate of the estate and avoids the decisions that might save it. It’s quietly funny and deeply sad, with the strange feeling of hearing laughter in a house already beginning to empty.
  • The Duel
    You spend most of it wanting to shake Laevsky, this lazy, self-excusing man rotting in a Black Sea town, while von Koren coldly argues he'd be better off dead. Then Chekhov quietly turns it, and you come out gentler about people, including yourself.

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thank you for reading

The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett. The text is in the US public domain, from the Standard Ebooks edition. Served from our own copy; read on their site for the full edition with images and typography.

First published in 1896.

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