ABSTRACT
The Seagull is partly about the ambitions of a young would-be actress Nina and a burgeoning writer Konstantin, to flee their isolation and loneliness in order to establish themselves as individuals and artists in their own right. Both have changed irreparably during the two-year interval. Nina has learned to endure through hardship and accept her bitter fate while Konstantin suffers from a frustration that only deepens and leads to suicide. Nina cannot talk to Konstantin without constantly referring to her shattered relationship with the writer Trigorin who first used and abandoned her in Moscow. Two years earlier, in a fit of jealousy, Konstantin shot a seagull and laid it at Nina's feet. Trigorin then used that image in a story and Nina picks it up again, attaching it to herself. The web of associations between past and present, fiction and reality circulate through Nina's mind as she delivers a monologue that loses thread and then picks it up again.
