The seagull monologue composition summary

A monologue from the play by Anton Chekhov

NOTE: This kind of monologue is usually reprinted by Two Plays of Tchekhof. Trans. George Calderon. London: Give Richards Limited., 1912.

TRIGORIN: Hmph! You talk of celebrity and happiness, of a few brilliant interesting life, but also for me these pretty words and phrases, if I might say therefore , are just like marmalade, which I never eat. You are very aged very kind, but We don\t really know what is so wonderful about warring. You have heard of obsessions, when a man can be haunted nighttime and daytime, say, by idea of the moon or something? Well, I\ve got my celestial body overhead. Day and night My spouse and i am obsessed by the same persistent believed, I must create, I must compose, I must write. No faster have I actually finished one story than I was somehow compelled to write one more, then a third, after a third a 4th. I write without stopping, other than to change race horses like a postchaise. I have no second option. What is there brilliant or perhaps delightful because, I should like to know? It\s a dog\s life! Here I am talking to you, excited and delighted, yet never for just one moment do I forget that there is an incomplete story looking forward to me in the house. I see a cloud formed like a grand piano. I think: I must point out somewhere within a story that a cloud passed, shaped like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope. I say to me: Sickly smell, mourning shade, must be stated in talking about a summertime evening. We lie in wait for every single phrase, for every single word that falls by my lips or yours and accelerate to fasten all these phrases and words away inside my literary store: they may come in handy some day. When I finish a piece of work, I fly for the theatre or go doing some fishing, in the expect of sleeping, of forgetting myself, but no, a brand new subject has already been turning, just like a heavy flat iron ball, in my brain, several invisible power drags myself to my personal table and I must make excitement to write and write. Etc for ever and ever.

I use no rest from me, I feel that I am consuming my own your life, that for the honey which I give unknown mouths out in the void, I rob my choicest bouquets of their pollen, pluck the flowers themselves and trample on their root base. Surely I must be upset? Surely my friends and acquaintances do not handle me as they would take care of a rational man? What are you producing at at this point? What are we all going to possess next? Hence the same thing continues over and over again, till I feel as if my friends\ interest, their particular praise and admiration, were all a deception, they are deceiving me personally as one deceives a ill man, and often I\m frightened that at any moment they might steal in me by behind and seize me personally and take me off, like Poprishtchin, to a madhouse. In the old days, my personal young best days, after i was a newbie, my function was a constant torture. A great unimportant article writer, especially when things are going against him, feels clumsy, cumbersome and superfluous, his nerves are drained and tormented, he cannot keep from hovering about individuals who have to do with art and materials, unrecognized, unnoticed, afraid to look guys frankly in the eye, like a excited gambler who have no money to play with. The reader that I hardly ever saw shown himself to my creativity as something unfriendly and mistrustful. I was afraid of the population, it afraid me, and when each fresh play of mine was put on, I felt each and every time that the dark ones inside the audience had been hostile and the fair ones coldly indifferent. How scary it was! What agony I went through! Certainly, it\s a pleasant feeling composing, and looking above proofs is definitely pleasant also. But as rapidly as the simple truth is published my heart sinks, and I notice that it is a failure, a mistake, that I ought to not have drafted it in any way, then I are angry with myself, and feel terrible. And the public reads it and says: How charming! How clever! How charming, however, not a plot on Tolstoy! or It\s a delightful history, but not so great as Turgenev\s \Fathers and Sons. \’ And so on, to my about to die day, my writings will almost always be clever and charming, brilliant and charming, nothing even more. And when I actually die, my local freinds, passing by simply my severe, will say: Here lies Trigorin. He was a charming writer, but not so good since Turgenev.