Act One: The Play by the Lake

A summer evening in the park of Sorin's estate, beside a lake. A broad avenue leads to the water, where a rough stage has been hastily built, blocking the view of the lake; a curtain hangs in front of it. Behind the curtain, workmen are hammering.

Masha, the daughter of the estate manager, came along the avenue with Medvedenko, a poor schoolteacher who was in love with her. She was dressed in black. "Why do you always wear black?" he asked. "I'm in mourning for my life. I'm unhappy." He could not understand: she had a father who was well off; while he earned twenty-three roubles a month and had to keep his mother and two sisters and a little brother, and still did not go about in black. "It isn't a question of money. A beggar can be happy." He loved her; he walked four miles here and four miles back every day, and met with nothing but indifference. She took snuff, and offered him some. The play would start soon, he said: Konstantin Gavrilovich had written it, and Nina Mikhailovna would act in it. "They love each other, and today their souls will merge in the effort to present a single artistic image. But my soul and yours have no points in common."

Sorin, the owner of the estate, an old man of sixty, came along with his nephew Konstantin Treplev, a young man of twenty-five. Sorin complained that he never felt at home in the country; he had slept ten hours, and felt as if he had a hangover. Konstantin was nervous and impatient: the moon was about to rise, and Nina was late; her father and stepmother watched her like a prisoner, and she had to slip away.

And he talked about his mother — Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina, a famous actress, Sorin's sister — who had come from Moscow with her lover, the novelist Trigorin, to spend the summer. "My mother is a psychological curiosity. Undeniably talented, intelligent, capable of sobbing over a novel . . . but just try praising Duse in front of her! She's jealous already — of me, of my play, because she isn't acting in it." She loved the theatre, she thought she was serving humanity and sacred art; but to him the modern theatre was routine and prejudice. "When the curtain goes up, and in a room with three walls, lit by artificial light, these great and gifted people, these priests of sacred art, show how people eat, drink, love, walk about and wear their jackets; when they try to fish a moral out of the most commonplace scenes and phrases — a little moral, easy to grasp, useful in the home . . . then I run, and run, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower, which crushed his brain with its vulgarity. We need new forms. New forms are needed, and if there aren't any, then we'd better have nothing at all."

And besides, he said, his mother did not love him: he was twenty-five, and his presence reminded her that she was no longer young. He was nobody — "a Kiev shopkeeper's son," as it said in his passport — surrounded at her table by famous people, writers and actors, who looked at him and measured his insignificance.

Nina Zarechnaya came running, out of breath: a young girl, the daughter of a rich landowner on the other side of the lake. She had run all the way; her father had gone out, and she had escaped. "My heart is full of you," said Konstantin. She was nervous: "Your mother — I'm not afraid of her, but Trigorin is here. I'm frightened and ashamed to act in front of him. A famous writer!" They kissed, shyly. She wished his play had more action, and more love in it; there were only speeches. "There must always be love in a play."

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The audience gathered: Arkadina, Trigorin, Sorin, the estate manager Shamrayev and his wife Polina, Masha, Medvedenko, and the doctor, Dorn, an elegant, sceptical man of fifty-five. Arkadina, playful, quoted Hamlet to her son: "'O Hamlet, speak no more: thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul.'"

The curtain rose. Beyond the stage the lake stretched away, and the moon was rising above the horizon. Nina sat on a stone, dressed in white, and spoke:

"Men, lions, eagles and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the water, starfish, and creatures invisible to the eye — all lives, all lives, all lives, having completed their sad cycle, are extinguished. Already thousands of centuries have passed since the earth bore any living being, and this poor moon lights her lamp in vain. In the meadow the cranes no longer wake with a cry, and the may-beetles are no longer heard in the lime groves. It is cold, cold, cold. Empty, empty, empty. Frightening, frightening, frightening . . .

"I am alone. Once in a hundred years I open my lips to speak, and my voice echoes mournfully in this emptiness, and no one hears . . . I am the universal soul of the world. In me is the soul of Alexander the Great, and of Caesar, and of Shakespeare, and of Napoleon, and of the lowest leech . . ."

Treplev's play — a vision of the world two hundred thousand years after all life has ended — is given here only in its opening lines.

Arkadina whispered: "This is something decadent." "Mother!" A smell of sulphur, and two red points of light appeared over the lake: the eyes of the Devil, "the father of eternal matter." Arkadina laughed: "Smoke and sulphur — is that necessary?" "Yes." "Ah, it's an effect." Konstantin could bear it no longer: "The play is over! Enough! Curtain! . . . Forgive me! I forgot that only the chosen few may write plays and act in them. I've violated the monopoly!" And he ran off.

Arkadina did not understand why he was hurt; she had only been joking. He was spoiled, she said, and touchy; he wanted to teach them how to write, and what to act. "These aren't new forms, it's simply bad temper." Then, in the silence, she heard singing across the lake, and grew softer: "Ten or fifteen years ago, here on the lake, you could hear music and singing almost every night . . . And I'm sorry I hurt my poor boy." She called for him. He did not come.

Nina came out from behind the stage, and Arkadina presented her to Trigorin. "I've always read you," said Nina, shyly. Trigorin, kind, absent, said he had understood nothing of the play, but had enjoyed watching it; the lake was full of fish; he loved fishing. "There is no greater pleasure than to sit in the evening on the bank and watch the float." Nina could not imagine that a man who had known the joy of creation could find pleasure in anything else. She had to go home; her father would be furious. They all went back to the house.

Dorn stayed behind. He alone had liked the play. Konstantin came back, looking for Nina, and Dorn told him: "I liked your play, very much. It's strange, and I haven't seen the end, but it made a strong impression . . . You took your subject from the realm of abstract ideas. That's right, because a work of art must express a great idea. Only what is serious is beautiful . . . But there must be a clear, definite thought in a work of art. You must know why you are writing; otherwise, if you go along this picturesque road without a definite goal, you'll lose your way, and your talent will destroy you." Konstantin hardly heard him; he wanted only Nina; and he ran off to find her.

Masha came to Dorn, desperate, and confessed: she loved Konstantin. She was tormented, and no one understood her. "Everyone's so nervous! So nervous!" said Dorn. "And so much love . . . Oh, the bewitching lake! But what can I do for you, my child? What? What?"