ABSTRACT
In the most well known example of how literature is framed as significant to the communication of Chekhov’s characters, Nina, in The Seagull, conveys her love and devotion to the novelist, Trigorin, by engraving a page and line reference from Trigorin’s book on the medallion that she gives to him. She refers directly to an imagined world of love where a character might say: “‘If you should ever need my life, then come and take i f ” (Chekhov 1991:98). In the play it is Trigorin who speaks the line that he has written. Nina draws her declaration from Trigorin’s imagined world but he delivers her performance text of love. This fictional example suggests how the emotional language and its meanings created in literature are absorbed into the personal exchanges of readers. As Lurana Donnels O’Malley has suggested about Chekhov’s use of other literary texts in The Seagull, its “plays-within-plays”, confronts the proposition that Chekhov’s realistic theatre reflects reality (1990:41). The significance of the intertextual references is that they expose how the literary realities of Chekhov’s texts are con structed as much in relation to other fictional worlds as they are depictions of social reality. Why is the language drawn from literary worlds important to Chekhov’s characters?
